ing in his day. Men could hardly construct a mechanical theory of the heavens before they had felt the need of a mechanical explanation of the simple facts of their daily lives.

These were his limitations-the natural limitations of his age. They should in nowise detract from the just measure of his strength. He achieved a lasting work. This comes to few. It was enough.

He died as he had lived, in far-away Poland, seven years after Erasmus, three before Luther, while Henry VIII. ruled in England and François Premier in France, and while the Medici still moulded the brilliant life of Florence. No doubt he died content-content and convinced; but neither his death nor his book made any stir. He wrote, of course, in Latin; his book seems never to have been translated into any other tongue until the four hundredth anniversary of his birth. It could not be read by the vulgar. The lives of men went on just as before. There is little evidence to show that any one dreamed that he had exploded a bomb-shell. It was just seventy-five years before the Church thought enough about the matter to ban his book from Christian eyes. How came it, then, that his ideas were not to live a little, then to be forgotten, like' those of Aristarchus, for another eighteen hundred years?

CHAPTER XIV

BRUNO AND THE RECEPTION OF THE COPPERNICAN IDEAS

Thoughts that great hearts once broke for
We breathe cheaply in the common air.
The dust we trample heedlessly

Throbbed once in saints and heroes rare,
Who perished, opening for the race

New pathways to the common place.

LOWELL, Masaccio.

CHAPTER XIV

BRUNO AND THE RECEPTION OF THE

COPPERNICAN IDEAS

IN the fifteenth century chance shook from its box of miracles another wonder than the discovery of the New World, hardly less fateful in its effects. That was the printing-press. It is with an ineffectual effort that we endeavour to realise now what was the world like when it had no printed bulletins of happenings on the earth, no chronicles and reviews for the easy dissemination of ideas, impressions, discoveries; no means for the rapid duplication of a book.

If now we look back into this time, we shall see how vitally separated were the conditions under which Aristarchus in Alexandria, Coppernicus in Frauenberg, wrought. The work of the Polish innovator was printed. A little later yet another invention was to confirm, for all time, their common idea. There seems little to doubt that, alone, the introduction of the printing-press into Europe would have saved the system of Coppernicus from the fate of that of his forerunner in Alexandria.

It was not so much the mere preservation of the printed word. The papyri upon which the ideas of Aristarchus were inscribed will last longer probably than any work of paper and print. The employment of slaves as copyists ensured a tolerable circulation for any work of note. We know that they had vast libraries; there were booksellers in that day as in this. Nevertheless, prodigious as was their industry, the hand could not compete with the machine. The price of books even in Alexandria was exorbitantly high; they were the treasures of rich men and kings.

With the coming of the printing-press, says Draper, the price of books was reduced by four-fifths. The use of electricity in our time has not spread more swiftly than did the printing art in the first thirty or fifty years after Gutenberg and Coster. Between the years 1470 and 1500 more than ten thousand