Geocentric model coelestium" ("On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres"), which posited that the Earth and the other planets instead revolved around the Sun. The geocentric system was still held for many years afterwards, as at the time the Copernican system did not offer better predictions than the geocentric system, and it posed problems for both natural philosophy and scripture. The Copernican system was no more accurate than Ptolemy's system, because it still used circular orbits. This was not altered until Johannes Kepler postulated that they were elliptical (Kepler's first law of planetary motion). With the invention of the telescope in 1609,
Hottentot (racial term) "hodmandod" in the years around 1700. The reduced Afrikaans/Dutch form "hotnot" has also been borrowed into South African English as an offensive term for black people. In seventeenth-century Dutch, "Hottentot" was at times used to denote all black people (synonymously with "Kaffir"), but at least some speakers were careful to use the term "Hottentot" to denote what they thought of as a race distinct from the supposedly darker-skinned "Kaffirs". This distinction between the non-Bantu "Cape Blacks" and the Bantu was noted as early as 1684 by French anthropologist François Bernier. The idea that "Hottentot" referred strictly to the non-Bantu peoples