uno and many other
heroes of human progress.

Columbus may have been original in his ideas, but it was the Northmen
who led in exploration. It was they who changed the old flat-bottomed
ships of the Roman Empire to the deep keels which made the exploration
of the Atlantic ocean possible.

This act of justice has been prompted by the appreciative sentiments
of the late Ole Bull, and the efforts of Miss Marie Brown, who has
lectured on the subject. Miss Brown says that Columbus learned of the
discovery of America at Rome, and also at Iceland, which he visited in
1477. Indeed, Columbus was not seeking the America of the Norsemen,
but was sailing to find the Indies.

But now that historic justice is done, we realize that as Bryant
expressed it of Truth, "the eternal years of God are hers," and she
needs a good many centuries to recover her stolen sceptre. The triumph
of truth follows battles in which there are many defeats that seem
almost fatal. What is the loss of five centuries in geographic truth
to the loss of a thousand years in astronomic science? It was for more
than a thousand years that the heliocentric theory of the universe,
developed by the genius of PYTHAGORAS, was ignored, denied, and
forgotten, until the honest scholar, COPERNICUS, revived it by a
mathematical demonstration, which he did not live long enough to see
trampled on; for the great astronomer that next appeared, Tycho Brahe,
denied it, and the Catholic Church attempted to suppress it in the
person of Galileo, who is said to have been forced by imprisonment and
torture to succumb to authority (the torture may not be positively
known, but is believed with good reason). Even Luther joined in the
theological warfare against science, saying, "I am now advised that a
new astrologer is risen, who presumeth to prove that the earth moveth
and goeth about, not the firmament, the sun and moon--not the
stars--like as when one sitteth on a coach, or in a ship that is
moved, thinketh he sitteth still and resteth, but the earth and trees
do move and run themselves. Thus it goeth; we give ourselves up to our
own foolish fancies and conceits. This fool (Copernicus) will turn the
whole art of astronomy upside down; but the Scripture showeth and
teacheth another lesson, when Joshua commandeth the sun to stand
still, and not the earth."

The attitude of Luther in this matter was the attitude of the Church
generally, in opposition to science, for it assumed its po