Legacy of the Roman Empire learned classes throughout the Middle Ages; this is especially seen during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Books which had a revolutionary impact on science, such as Nicolaus Copernicus' "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (1543), were composed in Latin. This language was not supplanted for scientific purposes until the 18th century, and for formal descriptions in zoology, as well as botany - it survived to the later 20th century. The modern international Binomial nomenclature holds to this day: the scientific name of each species is classified by a Latin or Latinized name. Today the Romance languages, which comprise all languages that descended
Myth of the flat Earth flat Earth. The widely circulated engraving of a man poking his head through the firmament surrounding the Earth to view the Empyrean, executed in the style of the 16th century, was published in Camille Flammarion's "L'Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire" (Paris, 1888, p. 163). The engraving illustrates the statement in the text that a medieval missionary claimed that "he reached the horizon where the Earth and the heavens met". In its original form, the engraving included a decorative border that places it in the 19th century. In later publications, some of which claimed that the engraving dates to the 16th century, the