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
History of the center of the Universe southern constellations rise higher above the horizon, and the shadow of Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is round, and spheres cast circular shadows while discs generally do not. This understanding was accompanied by models of the Universe that depicted the Sun, Moon, stars, and naked eye planets circling the spherical Earth, including the noteworthy models of Aristotle (see Aristotelian physics) and Ptolemy. This geocentric model was the dominant model from the 4th century BCE until the 17th century CE. Heliocentrism, or heliocentricism, is the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around a relatively stationary