the Cathedral at
Frauenburg. The town of Frauenburg has now only about twenty-five
hundred people, and it certainly was no larger then. The place is slow,
sleepy, and quite off the beaten track of travel.

When Canon Copernicus preached now, it was to a dear, stupid lot of old
marketwomen and overworked men and mischievous children. Oratory is a
collaboration--let him wax eloquent about the precession of the
equinoxes, and prate of Plato and Pythagoras if he wished--no one could
understand him! Rome is wise--the crystallized experience of centuries
is hers. Responsibility tames a man--marriage, political office,
churchly preferment--read history and note how these things have dulled
the bright blade of revolution and turned the radical into a
Presbyterian professor at Princeton, a staunch upholder of the
Established Order!

Plato said that Solar Energy found one of its forms of expression in
man. Some men are much more highly charged with it than others; your
genius is a man who does things. Do not think to dam up the red current
of his life--he may die.

Copernicus set to work practising medicine, and gave his services gratis
to the poor, who came for many miles to consult him.

He went from house to house and ordered his people to clean up their
back yards, to ventilate their houses, to bathe and be decent and
orderly. He devised a system of sewerage, and utilized the belfry of his
church as a water-tower so as to get a water pressure from the little
stream that ran near the town. The remains of this invention are to be
seen there in the church-steeple even unto this day.

King Sigismund of Poland had heard of the attacks made by Copernicus
upon the alchemists, and sent for him that he might profit by his
advice, for it seems that the King, too, had been having experience with
alchemists. In their seeking after a way to make gold out of the baser
metals they had actually succeeded. At least they said so, and had made
the King believe it.

They had shown the King how he could cheapen his coinage one-half, and
"it was just as good!" The King could not tell the difference when the
coins were new, but alas! when they went beyond the borders of Poland
they could only be passed at one-half their face-value; travelers
refused to accept them; and even the merchants at home were getting
afraid.

Copernicus analyzed some of this money made for the King by his
alchemist friends and found a large alloy of tin, copper an