In his “Garden of Epicurus,” Anatole France has put the two worlds side by side. One has only to do this to feel that Bruno, who at first held out his hands to the new vision, may afterwards have snatched them back again to shut it out. “We have some trouble,” says France, “in imagining the state of mind of a man in olden times who firmly believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and that all the stars turned round it. He felt under his feet damned souls writhing in flames, and perhaps he had seen with his own eyes, and smelled with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissures in the rocks. Lifting his head he contemplated the spheres, ... those bearing the Moon, Mercury, Venus--the one that Dante visited on Good Friday of the year 1300--the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, then the incorruptible firmament from which the stars were suspended like lamps. Beyond, his mind’s eye discerned the Ninth Heaven to which the saints were rapt, the Primum Mobile or Crystalline; and finally Empyrion, dwelling of the blessed, toward which, he firmly hoped, two angels robed in white would bear away, as it were a little child, his soul washed in baptism and perfumed with the oil of the last sacraments. In those days God had no other children than man, and all his creation was ordered in a fashion at once childlike and poetic like an immense cathedral. Thus imagined, the universe was so simple that it was represented in its entirety with its true figure and motions in certain great clocks run by machinery and appropriately painted.” [Illustration: Dante’s Conception of the Universe (From Hearnshaw’s _Mediaeval Contributions to Modern Civilization_.)] But now! “We are done with the spheres and the planets under which one was born lucky or unlucky, jovial or saturnine. The solid vault of the firmament is shattered. Our eye and our thought plunge into infinite abysses of heaven. Beyond the planets we discover no longer the Empyrion of the elect and of the angels, but a hundred millions of rolling suns escorted by their cortège of obscure satellites invisible to us. In the midst of this infinity of worlds our own Sun is but a bubble of gas and our Earth but a fleck of mud.”