The simple, hard-working gardeners with whom Copernicus lived, had a reverent awe for the great man; they guessed his worth, but still had suspicions of his sanity. His nightly vigils they took for a sort of religious ecstasy, and a wholesome fear made them quite willing not to do anything that might disturb him.
So passed the days away, and from a light-hearted, ambitious man, Copernicus had grown old and bowed, and nearly blind from constant watching of the stars and writing at night.
But his book, "The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies," was at last complete. For forty years he had worked at it, and for twenty-seven years, he himself says, not a day or a night had passed without his having added something to it.
He felt that he had in this book told the truth. If men wanted to know the facts about the heavens they would find them here. He had approached the subject with no preconceived ideas; he had ever been willing to renounce a theory when he found it wrong. He knew what all other great astronomers had taught, and out of them all he had built a Science of Astronomy that he knew would stand secure.
But what should he do with all this mass of truth he had discovered? It was in his own brain, and it was in the three thousand pages of this book, which had been rewritten five times. In a few years at most, his brain would be stilled in death; and in five minutes, ignorance and malice might reduce the book to ashes, and the forty years' labor of Copernicus--working, dreaming, calculating, weeping, praying--would all go for naught and be but a tale that is told. Others might have lived such lives and known as much as he, and all was lost!
To send the book frankly to Rome and ask the Censor for the privilege to publish it, was out of the question entirely--the request would be refused, the manuscript destroyed, and his own life might be in danger.
To publish it at home without the consent of his Bishop would be equally dangerous. There would be a bonfire of every copy in the public square; for in this volume, all that the priests taught of astronomy had been contradicted and refuted.
And then it occurred to him to send the manuscript to the free city of Nuremberg, the home of science, art and free speech, where men could print what they thought was truth--Nuremberg, the home of Albrecht Durer. With the book he sent a bag of gold, his savings of a lifetime, to pay the expense of printing the volume and putting it before the world.