wards he maintains that Tycho had merely imitated the system of Apollonius of Perga, and that Helisæus Röslin had recently with equal coolness claimed the same as his own.[1] He attacks Tycho and Rothmann with the coarsest abuse, and is very anxious to disprove that he was ever in Tycho's employment, as Rothmann had believed, and tells how he came to Hveen with Erik Lange. It appears that Tycho cut him short during a dispute with the remark that "those German fellows were all half-cracked,"[2] and that he generally went by the appellation of "Erik's Dreng" (i.e., Erik's boy), and he adds proudly, "Jam non sum Jerix Dreng sed Imp. Rudolphi II. Mathematicus." To Tycho's accusation that Reymers had stolen the idea of the new system during his stay at Uraniborg, he answers that in that case it would have been stolen from him again, since Tycho, before his departure, got somebody to search his papers at night, when nothing was found but some plans of the buildings. The only way he could ever have spoken ill of Tycho must have been by joking about his nose, of which the upper part had been cut off, and he indulges in some scurrilous remarks about the facilities which Tycho possessed for taking observations through his nose without sights or instruments. But other parts of the book, like the "Fundamentum astronomicum,"[3] showed that Reymers was a very skilful mathematician, who deserves every credit for having by his own exertions, and apparently without enjoying the advantages of regular teaching, raised himself from the position of a swineherd to
- ↑ Helisæus Rœslinus in 1597 published a book, De opere Dei Creatoris, in which he stated that he had independently found the same system as Tycho Brahe, and in a later publication he stated in detail how he did this after reading Ursus' book of 1588. (See Frisch in vol. i. p. 228 of his edition of Kepleri Opera.)
- ↑ Reymers writes this in broken Danish: "Den Tyske Karle er allsammell all gall" (should be: "de Tydske Karle ere allesammen halv gale").
- ↑ See above, p. 183.
