property.[1] The great globe alone was saved, and was in 1632 found at Neisse, in Silesia, at the College of the Jesuits, by Prince Ulrik, a son of King Christian IV. of Denmark, who was in the service of the Elector of Saxony, and had taken Neisse by storm. How or when the globe had been sent there is not known, but Prince Ulrik now sent it to Denmark, where it was first kept at the Castle of Rosenborg, then at the University,[2] and afterwards in a room of the Round Tower which had been erected in Copenhagen to serve as a University observatory, and was finished in 1656. An inscription, composed by Longomontanus, was attached to the globe or to the wall of the room, and the beautiful monument of the great astronomer remained at the Round Tower till October 1728, when it was unfortunately destroyed in the great conflagration, in which, among many other things, Ole Römer's unpublished observations perished. At the present day there is neither at Prague nor at Copenhagen the smallest vestige of Tycho's celebrated instruments.[3]
Tycho's wife and children all remained in Bohemia, probably because they were honoured and respected there, while the difficulty which they found in obtaining payment for the instruments must also have tied them to Bohemia, as they must have known well that they would have no chance of getting their money unless they remained on the spot. Tycho's widow died in 1604, and was buried beside her husband, as we have already mentioned. A year or two before her death she had purchased a country property towards the Saxon frontier, and her eldest son, Tycho, had in March 1604 married the widow of a country gentleman in the same neighbourhood. He became the father of five children, and died in 1627. His younger brother Jörgen (George), died in 1640. Magdalene Brahe, Tycho's eldest daughter, apparently never married; of the second daughter, Sophia, nothing is known except that she became a Roman
- ↑ Gassendi, p. 216.
- ↑ Where Huet saw it in 1652 (Commentarius, p. 81).
- ↑ The inscription is given by Gassendi, p. 217; Weistritz, i. p. 217. At the Prague observatory (founded in 1751 in the Clementinum, far from Tycho Brahe's observatory) there are two sextants and a clock showing the Tychonic system, which are supposed to have belonged to Tycho Brahe; but they show no sign of Tycho's refined workmanship, and the two sextants (the larger of which is said to have been made for him in 1600 by Erasmus Habermel) have not his peculiar pinnules. There is no proof of their ever having belonged to Tycho Brahe (Astron. meteorol. und magn. Beobachtungen an der Sternwarte zu Prag im Jahre 1880, p. iv. ).
