With the year of his voyage the epoch of the Middle Ages is usually regarded as coming to an end.

It must not be supposed that any very sudden change came over the aspect of scholarship of the time, but the preliminaries of great things had been achieved, and when Columbus made his famous voyage in 1492, the man was already alive who was to bring forward the first great vitalizing thought in the field of pure science that the Western world had originated for more than a thousand years.

This man bore the name of Kopernik, or in its familiar Anglicized form, Copernicus.

His life work and that of his disciples will claim our attention in the succeeding chapter.
IV.

THE NEW COSMOLOGY--COPERNICUS TO KEPLER AND GALILEO We have seen that the Ptolemaic astronomy, which was the accepted doctrine throughout the Middle Ages, taught that the earth is round.
Doubtless there was a popular opinion current which regarded the earth as flat, but it must be understood that this opinion had no champions among men of science during the Middle Ages.