So, influenced by these advisors and this hope, I have at length allowed my friends to publish the work, as they had long besought me to do.

Those things which I am saying now may be obscure, yet they will be made clearer in their proper place.

Therefore, having obtained the opportunity from these sources, I too began to consider the mobility of the earth.

In the first book I shall describe all the positions of the spheres, along with the motions which I attribute to the Earth, so that the book will contain as it were the general structure of the universe. In the remaining books I relate the motions of the remaining stars, and all the spheres, to the mobility of the Earth, so that it can be thence established how far the motions and appearances of the remaining stars and spheres can be saved, if they are referred to the motions of the Earth.

The earth together with its surrounding waters must in fact have such a shape as its shadow reveals, for it eclipses the moon with the arc of a perfect circle.

In so many and such important ways, then, do the planets bear witness to the earth's mobility.

If there be some who, though ignorant of all mathematics . . . dare to reprove this work, because of some passage of Scripture, which they have miserably warped to their purpose, I regard them not, and even despise their rash judgement.