"The theory of Copernicus not only founded modern system of astronomy, but made men to examine other articles of their creed, after were thus convinced that they had taught and believed the earth to be stationary 6000 years. All the opinions of the ancients respecting the motion of the earth were speculative hypotheses, arising from the Pythagorean school, which, as we know, considered fire the centre of the world, round which all was moving. Thus we ought explain the passage of Aristarchus of Samos, mentioned by Aristotle in his Arenario. Aristarchus, a Pythagorean, held the idea that the earth revolves round its axis, and at the same time, in an oblique circle round the sun; and that the distance of the stars is so great, that this circle is but a point in comparison with their orbits, and therefore the motion of the earth produces no apparent motion in them. Every Pythagorean might have entertained this idea, who considered the sun or fire as the centre of the world, and who was, at the same time, so correct a thinker, and so good an astronomer, as Aristarchus of Samos. But this was not the Copernican system of the world. It was the motions the planets, their stations, and their retrogradations, which astronomers could not explain, and which led them to the complicated motions of the epicycles, in which the planets moved in cycloids round the earth."