[118] Sir Thomas Heath, Aristarchus of Samos, the Ancient Copernicus: a history of Greek astronomy to Aristarchus together with Aristarchus’s treatise, “On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon,” a new Greek text with translation and notes, Oxford, 1913, admits that “our treatise does not contain any suggestion of any but the geocentric view of the universe, whereas Archimedes tells us that Aristarchus wrote a book of hypotheses, one of which was that the sun and the fixed stars remain unmoved and that the earth revolves round the sun in the circumference of a circle.” Such evidence seems scarcely to warrant applying the title of “The Ancient Copernicus” to Aristarchus. And Heath thinks that Schiaparelli (I precursori di Copernico nell’antichità, and other papers) went too far in ascribing the Copernican hypothesis to Heraclides of Pontus. On Aristotle’s answer to Pythagoreans who denied the geocentric theory see Orr (1913), pp. 100-2.
[119] “Farewell, Nature, parent of all things, and in thy manifold multiplicity bless me who, alone of the Romans, has sung thy praise.”
[120] For the Latin text of the Naturalis Historia I have used the editions of D. Detlefsen, Berlin, 1866-1882, and L. Janus, Leipzig, 1870, 6 vols. in 3; 5 vols. in 3. There is, however, a good English translation of the Natural History, with an introductory essay, by J. Bostock and H. T. Riley, London, 1855, 6 vols. (Bohn Library), which is superior to both the German editions in its explanatory notes and subject index, and which also apparently antedates them in some readings suggested for doubtful passages in the text. Three modes of dividing the Natural History into chapters are indicated in the editions of Janus and Detlefsen. I shall employ that found in the earlier editions of Hardouin, Valpy, Lemaire, and Ajasson, and preferred in the English translation of Bostock and Riley.
[121] Bostock and Riley (1855), I, xvi.
[122] NH, Preface.
[123] NH, Preface.
[124] NH, XXII, 7.
[125] NH, II, 6.
[126] NH, II, 46.
[127] NH, II, 5. “Deus est mortali iuvare mortalem....”