While yet these facts were very imperfectly known—­indeed, were rather speculations than facts—­Giordano Bruno, an Italian, born seven years after the death of Copernicus, published a work on the “Infinity of the Universe and of Worlds;” he was also the author of “Evening Conversations on Ash-Wednesday,” an apology for the Copernican system, and of “The One Sole Cause of Things.”  To these may be added an allegory published in 1584, “The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast.”  He had also collected, for the use of future astronomers, all the observations he could find respecting the new star that suddenly appeared in Cassiopeia, A.D. 1572, and increased in brilliancy, until it surpassed all the other stars.  It could be plainly seen in the daytime.  On a sudden, November 11th, it was as bright as Venus at her brightest.  In the following March it was of the first magnitude.  It exhibited various hues of color in a few months, and disappeared in March, 1574.

The star that suddenly appeared in Serpentarius, in Kepler’s time (1604), was at first brighter than Venus.  It lasted more than a year, and, passing through various tints of purple, yellow, red, became extinguished.

Originally, Bruno was intended for the Church.  He had become a Dominican, but was led into doubt by his meditations on the subjects of transubstantiation and the immaculate conception.  Not caring to conceal his opinions, he soon fell under the censure of the spiritual authorities, and found it necessary to seek refuge successively in Switzerland, France, England, Germany.  The cold-scented sleuth-hounds of the Inquisition followed his track remorselessly, and eventually hunted him back to Italy.  He was arrested in Venice, and confined in the Piombi for six years, without books, or paper, or friends.

In England he had given lectures on the plurality of worlds, and in that country had written, in Italian, his most important works.  It added not a little to the exasperation against him, that he was perpetually declaiming against the insincerity; the impostures, of his persecutors—­that wherever he went he found skepticism varnished over and concealed by hypocrisy; and that it was not against the belief of men, but against their pretended belief, that he was fighting; that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor faith.

In his “Evening Conversations” he had insisted that the Scriptures were never intended to teach science, but morals only; and that they cannot be received as of any authority on astronomical and physical subjects.  Especially must we reject the view they reveal to us of the constitution of the world, that the earth is a flat surface, supported on pillars; that the sky is a firmament—­the floor of heaven.  On the contrary, we must believe that the universe is infinite, and that it is filled with self-luminous and opaque worlds, many of them inhabited; that there is nothing above and around us but space