Bruno was burned at
the stake (1600); but the curtains that had so long been drawn
about the earth were now torn aside for ever, and men looked
inquiringly into the unfathomable depths beyond. Descartes
(1596-1650) revived the old Greek idea of a gradual evolution of
the heavens and the earth from a primitive chaos of particles,
taught that the stars stood out at unimaginable distances in the
ocean of ether, and imagined the ether as stirring in gigantic
whirlpools, which bore cosmic bodies in their orbits as the eddy
in the river causes the cork to revolve.
These stimulating conjectures made a deep impression on the new
age. A series of great astronomers had meantime been patiently
and scientifically laying the foundations of our knowledge.
Kepler (1571-1630) formulated the laws of the movement of the
planets; Newton (1642-1727) crowned the earlier work with his
discovery of the real agency that sustains cosmic bodies in their
relative positions. The primitive notion of a material frame and
the confining dome of the ancients were abandoned. We know now
that a framework of the most massive steel would be too frail to
hold together even the moon and the earth.
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