on the projected reform of the calendar, on the ground that the motions of the sun and moon were not known with sufficient accuracy. It is possible that with better data he might have made much more progress. He was in no hurry to publish anything, perhaps on account of possible opposition. Certainly Luther, with his obstinate conviction of the verbal accuracy of the Scriptures, rejected as mere folly the idea of a moving earth, and Melanchthon thought such opinions should be prohibited, but Rheticus, a professor at the Protestant University of Wittenberg and an enthusiastic pupil of Copernicus, urged publication, and undertook to see the work through the press. This, however, he was unable to complete and another Lutheran, Osiander, to whom he entrusted it, wrote a preface, with the apparent intention of disarming opposition, in which he stated that the principles laid down were only abstract hypotheses convenient for purposes of calculation. This unauthorised interpolation may have had its share in postponing the prohibition of the book by the Church of Rome.
According to Copernicus the earth is only a planet like the others, and not even the biggest one, while the sun is the most important body in the system, and the stars probably too far away for any motion of the earth to affect their apparent places. The earth in fact is very small in comparison with the distance of the stars, as evidenced by the fact that an observer anywhere on the earth appears to be in the middle of the universe. He shows that the revolution of the earth will account for the seasons, and for the stationary points and retrograde motions of the planets. He corrects definitely the order of the planets outwards from the sun, a matter which had been in dispute. A notable defect is due to the idea that a body can only revolve about another body or a point, as if rigidly connected with it, so that, in order to keep the earth's axis in a constant direction in space, he has
