Abstract
ON October 24, 1901, three hundred years will have elapsed since the death of Tycho Brahe, and this memoir has been published in order to draw attention to that day and at the same time to give some account of the very few relics existing at Prague of the great astronomer, who spent his last years there and whose tomb is in the Teinkirche in that city. Print and illustrations of this memoir are excellent, but we could have wished that the text had been fuller and that at least one of the relics had been discussed in some detail. Tycho Brahe's instruments seem to have been destroyed during the Thirty Years' War, and not one of those he used at Uraniburg has been preserved; his library was scattered, but his manuscript observations fortunately found their way back to Denmark after having been thoroughly utilised by Kepler. The relics at Prague are therefore very modest ones—a few books from his library and a few manuscripts of no great importance. In the library of the Bohemian National Museum there is an album which Tycho gave his eldest son in 1599; on the first page of it is a portrait of the astronomer, reproduced in the present memoir. It is the well-known engraving by Geyn, coloured by hand. The book contains an autograph dedication by Tycho and a picture of his family arms, both of which Dr. Studnicka gives in facsimile. In the University Library there is a more important MS., containing on twenty leaves a short text-book on trigonometry, dated 1591. This was published in 1886 in photolithographic facsimile by Dr. Studnicka, who is exceedingly irritated with the writer of this review for having ventured to say that “Tycho has written his name under the title of the MS., but the handwriting of the remainder does not seem to be his.” He even insinuates that the writer had perhaps never seen the facsimile reprint when he uttered this shocking heresy. The fact is, that the excellent reprint showed that the MS. in question was written in an extremely legible and distinct hand, while Tycho's astronomical MSS in Copenhagen are anything but pleasant to wade through, and we are still of the opinion that it is very doubtful (to say the least) whether the MS. in question was written by Tycho himself. But this is really of no consequence, as nobody doubts that he is the author of it. The University Library also possesses a MS. copy of the table of sines of Copernicus, written by Tycho. Of much greater interest is a copy of the edition of Ptolemy's works of 1551, on the title-page of which Tycho has written that he bought it at Copenhagen on November 30, 1560, for two thaler. He was barely fourteen years of age when he obtained this standard work, and he made good use of it, as appears from the great number of marginal notes which he entered in it from time to time. We should have liked very much to have learned something about these notes, which doubtless would throw much light on the growth of the owner's knowledge, but we are told nothing about the nature of the notes, nor about those written in a copy of the work of Copernicus (the Basle edition of 1566), which are also supposed to be in Tycho's hand.
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D., J. Tychoniana at Prague 1 . Nature 63, 206–207 (1900). https://doi.org/10.1038/063206a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/063206a0