on--suns for other systems of
worlds?

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