ist philosophy. This was the
learned and enlightened Cardinal Cusa, a fisherman's son from the banks
of the Moselle, whose distinguished career in the Church and in
literature extended over a considerable part of the fifteenth century
(1401-64). In his singular treatise _De Docta Ignorantia_, one of the
most notable literary monuments of the early Renaissance, the following
passage occurs:--"To a spectator on the surface of the sun, the
splendour which appears to us would be invisible, since it contains, as
it were, an earth for its central mass, with a circumferential envelope
of light and heat, and between the two an atmosphere of water and clouds
and translucent air." The luminary of Herschel's fancy could scarcely be
more clearly portrayed; some added words, however, betray the origin of
the Cardinal's idea. "The earth also," he says, "would appear as a
shining star to any one outside the fiery element." It was, in fact, an
extension to the sun of the ancient elemental doctrine; but an extension
remarkable at that period, as premonitory of the tendency, so powerfully
developed by subsequent discoveries, to assimilate the orbs of heaven to
the model of our insignificant planet, and to extend the brotherhood of
our system and our species to the farthest limit of the visible or
imaginable universe.

In later times we find Flamsteed communicating to Newton, March 7, 1681,
his opinion "that the substance of the sun is terrestrial matter, his
light but the liquid menstruum encompassing him."[145] Bode in 1776
arrived independently at the conclusion that "the sun is neither burning
nor glowing, but in its essence a dark planetary body, composed like our
earth of land and water, varied by mountains and valleys, and enveloped
in a vaporous atmosphere";[146] and the learned in general applauded and
acquiesced. The view, however, was in 1787 still so far from popular,
that the holding of it was alleged as a proof of insanity in Dr. Elliot
when accused of a murderous assault on Miss Boydell. His friend Dr.
Simmons stated on his behalf that he had received from him in the
preceding January a letter giving evidence of a deranged mind, wherein
he asserted "that the sun is not a body of fire, as hath been hitherto
supposed, but that its light proceeds from a dense and universal aurora,
which may afford ample light to the inhabitants of the surface beneath,
and yet be at such a distance aloft as not to annoy them. No objection,
he s