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If they should say that the atmosphere is carried along by the earth with the same speed as the earth's own revolution, it would be no less true that the bodies contained therein would not have the same velocity. Or if they were swept along with the air, no longer would anything seem to precede or to follow, but all would always appear stationary, and neither in flight nor in throwing would any ever advance or retreat. That is, however, what we see happening, since neither the retardation nor the acceleration of anything is traceable to the movement of the earth.
APPENDIX B.
"To His Holiness, Paul III, Supreme Pontiff,
Preface By Nicholas Copernicus to His Books on Revolutions."
(A translation of the Præfatio in Copernicus: De Revolutionibus; pp. 3-8.)
"I can certainly well believe, most holy Father, that, while mayhap a few will accept this my book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the spheres of the world, ascribing certain motions to the sphere of the earth, people will clamor that I ought to be cast out at once for such an opinion. Nor are my ideas so pleasing to me that I will not carefully weigh what others decide concerning them. And although I know that the meditations of philosophers are remote from the opinions of the unlearned, because it is their aim to seek truth in all things so far as it is permitted by God to the human reason, nevertheless I think that opinions wholly alien to the right ought to be driven out. Thus when I considered with myself what an absurd fairytale people brought up in the opinion, sanctioned by many ages, that the earth is motionless in the midst of the heaven, as if it were the center of it, would think it if I were to assert on the contrary that the earth is moved; I hesitated long whether I would give to the light my commentaries composed in proof of this motion, or whether it would indeed be more satisfactory to follow the example of the Pythagoreans and various others who were wont to pass down the mysteries of philosophy not by books, but from hand to hand only to their friends and relatives, as the letter of Lysis to Hipparchus proves.[1] But verily they seemed to me not to have done this, as some think, from any dis-
- ↑ See Prowe: Nic. Cop.: III; 128-137.
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