Note 57 — Chapter IV · COPPERNICUS.
Reading edition
Recent biographers have called attention to a cancelled passage in the manuscript of the De Revolutionibus in which Coppernicus shews that an ellipse can be generated by a combination of circular motions. The proposition is, however, only a piece of pure mathematics, and has no relation to the motions of the planets round the sun. It cannot, therefore, fairly be regarded as in any way an anticipation of the ideas of Kepler (chapter VII.).