shorter time assisted Tycho Brahe, we know little but the names. A certain Hans Coll, or Johannes Aurifaber, who had charge of the workshop, must have been with him a long time, as he is mentioned as observing in 1585, and he died at Hveen in 1591.[1] Many details as to the life at Hveen were communicated to Gassendi by Willem Janszoon Blaev, the celebrated printer at Amsterdam, who in his youth (he was born at Alkmaar in 1571) had spent a few years at Hveen, and to whom we also owe the large map of the island in his son's Grand Atlas.[2]
Two other inmates of Tycho's house may also be mentioned here. One was a maid of the name of Live (or Liuva) Lauridsdatter, who afterwards lived with Tycho's sister, Sophia, and later was a sort of quack-doctor at Copenhagen, where she also practised astrology, &c. She died unmarried in 1693, when she is said to have reached the ripe age of 124.[3] The other was his fool or jester,
- ↑ Observationes Septem Cometarum (1867), pp. 63-64; Baretti Historia Cœlestis, p. 429; Diary, 30th November 1591.
- ↑ The map was made "cum sub Tychone Astronomiæ operam daret." Blaev must have been at Hveen during the last few years of Tycho's residence there. He is mentioned in the Observations of Comets, p. 41, as being there in 1596. For a list of Tycho's other disciples and assistants, as far as their names are known, see Note B. at end of this volume. In 1589 Rothmann inquired, on behalf of Professor Victor Schönfeld of Marburg, whether Tycho would receive a son of Schönfeld among his pupils, adding that the young man had just been made a Master of Arts; to which Tycho answered that he might come, but whether he was a master or not did not make much difference, that it was better to be a master than to be called one, and it would be sufficient if he was a student of the free arts (Epist., pp. 154, 168). In Wolf's Encomion Regni Daniæ, 1654, p. 526, it is stated that there were small bells in the rooms of the students, which could be rung by touching hidden buttons in the observatories or sitting-rooms, by which Tycho, to the surprise of his guests, could make any of the students come to him, apparently merely by calling their name in a low voice. Wolf also tells how Tycho could lie in bed and observe the stars through a hole in the wall, with some mechanism which could be turned round. Probably this refers to the mural quadrant, which had a "hole in the wall."
- ↑ Kästner, Gesch. der Math., ii. p. 408, quoting Nova Literaria Maris Balthici, August 1698, p. 142. There is a portrait of this woman in the National Historical Museum at Frederiksborg Castle.
