Copernicus.[1] The money sent by Tycho had been stolen by the carrier, who had never since been heard of, but the instrument had now arrived, and would be forwarded.[2] Tycho can hardly have received these letters before starting from home, and was therefore possibly still ignorant of another piece of news contained in them, namely, that the great quadrant at Göggingen, which he had designed six years before, had in the previous December been blown down and destroyed in a great storm.[3] The great globe which he had ordered to be made during his former visit was now nearly completed, and was the following year brought to Denmark with great trouble. At Augsburg, Tycho on this occasion made the acquaintance of a painter, Tobias Gemperlin, and induced him to go to Denmark, where he afterwards painted a number of pictures for Uraniborg and the royal castles.
At Ratisbon great numbers of princes and nobles from all parts of the empire were just then gathering to witness the coronation as King of the Romans of Rudolph the Second, King of Hungary and Bohemia, on the 1st November. Tycho also betook himself thither in the hope of meeting the Landgrave, and perhaps some other scientific men. He was, however, disappointed as to the Landgrave, who did not appear; but he had the consolation of meeting, among others, the physician-in-ordinary to the Emperor, Thaddæus Hagecius or Hayek, a Bohemian, whose name we have already met with among the writers on the new star. He gave
- ↑ Erasmus Oswald Schreckenfuchs (1511–1579), Professor of Mathematics, Rhetorics, and Hebrew, first at Tübingen, afterwards at Freiburg in Breisgau; editor of the works of Ptolemy (Basle, 1551), and author of commentaries on the writings of Sacrobosco, Purbach, and Regiomontanus.
- ↑ By Petrus Aurifaber, "cum supellectile sua" (Was he the maker of the globe?) These letters are published in T. Brahe et ad eum doct. vir. Epist., pp. 11 seq. Whether Tycho ever got the sphere is not known.
- ↑ It may have been re-erected later, as Joh. Major wrote to Tycho Brahe in 1577 that it was still in use; but, on the other hand, P. Hainzel wrote in 1579 that he had not observed the comet of 1577 for want of convenient instruments (T. B. et doct. vir. Epist., pp. 42 and 46).
