learned this he was extremely annoyed, and seemed to think that Wittich had pretended to be the inventor of all he had described to the Landgrave (although the latter had not said so), and in his first letter he took care to tell the Landgrave that Wittich had seen all these things at Hveen, as might already be seen from the word "sextant."[1] How long Wittich remained at Cassel is not known; he was there in November 1584, when he observed a lunar eclipse, and the Landgrave's astronomer, Rothmann, mentions him in a letter of April 1586 as having left a good while previously. He died on the 9th January 1587,[2] and Tycho seems on learning this to have regretted that he had suspected Wittich of robbing him of his fame, for he wrote in August 1588 that he would have written more moderately about him had he known he was dead.[3] Though Wittich spent but a short time at Uraniborg, his name deserves to be remembered by astronomers, as he was apparently the ablest of all Tycho's pupils.[4]
Most of these pupils spent a much longer time at Uraniborg than Wittich had done. Thus Gellius Sascerides stayed about six years there. He was born at Copenhagen in 1562, and was a son of Johannes Sascerides of Alkmaar, in Holland, professor of Hebrew in the University of Copenhagen. Gellius had studied at Copenhagen and at Wittenberg, and came to Hveen early in 1582, where he
- ↑ Ibid., p. 7.
- ↑ According to a MS. in the library at Breslau, quoted by Rud. Wolf in the Vierteljahrsschrift der Astron. Gesellschaft, xvii. p. 129.
- ↑ Epist. Astron., p. 113. Tycho here again praises his cleverness "in Geometricis et Triangulorum ac numerorum tractatione." In the letter of 20th January 1587 (to which he refers) he had, after all, only said: "Si mea inventa . . . pro suis venditat, nec fatetur per quem ea habuerit, rem a viro bono et grato, ac sinceritate integritateque Mathematica alienam committit."
- ↑ In Chalmers' General Biogr. Dictionary, London, 1815, vol. xx. p. 243, it is stated, on the authority of a Life of the Scotch mathematician Duncan Liddel by Prof. Stuart (1790), that Liddel studied mathematics at Breslau, 1582-84, "under Paul Wittichius, an eminent professor."
