Fig. 2.—Leonardo da Vinci.
Nicolas Copernik was his proper name. Copernicus is merely the Latinized form of it, according to the then prevailing fashion. He was born at Thorn, in Polish Prussia, in 1473. His father is believed to have been a German. He graduated at Cracow as doctor in arts and medicine, and was destined for the ecclesiastical profession. The details of his life are few; it seems to have been quiet and uneventful, and we know very little about it. He was instructed in astronomy at Cracow, and learnt mathematics at Bologna. Thence he went to Rome, where he was made Professor of Mathematics; and soon afterwards he went into orders. On his return home, he took charge of the principal church in his native place, and became a canon. At Frauenburg, near the mouth of the Vistula, he lived the remainder of his life. We find him reporting on coinage for the Government, but otherwise he does not appear as having entered into the life of the times.
He was a quiet, scholarly monk of studious habits, and with a reputation which drew to him several earnest students, who received vivâ voce instruction from him; so, in study and meditation, his life passed.
He compiled tables of the planetary motions which were far more correct than any which had hitherto appeared, and which remained serviceable for long afterwards. The Ptolemaic system of the heavens, which had been the orthodox system all through the Christian era, he endeavoured to improve and simplify by the hypothesis that the sun was the centre of the system instead of the earth; and the first consequences of this change he worked out for many years, producing in the end a great book: his one life-work. This famous work, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium," embodied all his painstaking calculations, applied his new system to each of the bodies in the solar system in succession, and treated besides of much other recondite matter. Towards the close of his life it was put into type. He can scarcely be said to have lived to see it appear, for he was stricken with paralysis before its completion; but a printed copy was brought to his bedside and put into his hands, so that he might just feel it before he died.
Fig. 3.—Copernicus.
That Copernicus was a giant in intellect or power—such as had lived in the past, and were destined to live in the near future—I see no reason whatever to believe. He was just a quiet, earnest, patient, and God-fearing man, a deep student, an unbiassed thinker, although with no specially brilliant or striking gifts; yet to him it was given to effect such a revolution in the whole course of man's thoughts as is difficult to parallel.
You know what the outcome of his work was. It proved—he did not merely speculate, he proved—that the earth is a planet like the others, and that it revolves round the sun.