is incapable of change; that it is, has been, and forever
will be, the same inexorable, immutable FACT, inseparable from all
phenomena. Law, in this sense, was not enacted or made. It could not
have been otherwise than as it is. That which necessarily exists has
no creator.

Only a few years ago this earth was considered the real center of the
universe; all the stars were supposed to revolve around this
insignificant atom. The German mind, more than any other, has done
away with this piece of egotism. Purbach and Mullerus, in the
fifteenth century, contributed most to the advancement of astronomy in
their day. To the latter the world is indebted for the introduction of
decimal fractions, which completed our arithmetical notation, and
formed the second of the three steps by which, in modern times, the
science of numbers has been so greatly improved; and yet both of these
men believed in the most childish absurdities--at least in enough of
them to die without their orthodoxy having ever been questioned.

Next came the great Copernicus, and he stands at the head of the heroic
thinkers of his time, who had the courage and the mental strength to
break the chains of prejudice, custom and authority, and to establish
truth on the basis of experience, observation and reason. He removed
the earth, so to speak, from the center of the universe, and ascribed
to it a twofold motion, and demonstrated the true position which it
occupies in the solar system.

At his bidding the earth began to revolve. At the command of his
genius it commenced its grand flight amid the eternal constellations
around the sun. For fifty years his discoveries were disregarded. All
at once, by the exertions of Galileo, they were kindled into so grand a
conflagration as to consume the philosophy of Aristotle, to alarm the
hierarchy of Rome, and to threaten the existence of every opinion not
founded upon experience, observation and reason.

The earth was no longer considered a universe governed by the caprices
of some revengeful Deity, who had made the stars out of what he had
left after completing the world, and had stuck them in the sky simply
to adorn the night.

I have said this much concerning astronomy because it was the first
splendid step forward! The first sublime blow that shattered the lance
and shivered the shield of superstition; the first real help that man
received from heaven. Because it was the first great lever placed
beneath