210 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



KEPLER. Pierre de la Ramee, or Petrus Ramus, a French 

 mathematician and philosopher, impatient with the cumbrous 

 astronomical hypotheses of the ancients, and unsatisfied with 

 Copernicus' proposed simplification, published a work in 1569 

 expressing the hope 



' that some distinguished German philosopher would arise and found 

 a new astronomy on careful observations by means of logic and mathe- 

 matics, discarding all the notions of the ancients/ 



Within a few months he discussed the matter at length with 

 Tycho Brahe at Augsburg. Without accepting Ramus' views, 

 the young astronomer did make it his life work to lay the neces- 

 sary foundation for such a new astronomy. Thirty years later, 

 Mastlin, professor at Tubingen, wrote his former student Kepler 

 then aged 28 



that Tycho 'had hardly left a shadow of what had hitherto been 

 taken for astronomical science, and that only one thing was certain, 

 which was that mankind knew nothing of astronomical matters.' 



Born late in 1571 in Wiirtemberg, of Protestant parents in 

 very straitened circumstances, Johann Kepler's whole life was a 

 struggle against poverty, ill-health, and adverse conditions. In 

 1594, abandoning with some hesitation theological studies, for 

 which his acceptance of the new Copernican hypothesis dis- 

 qualified him, he was appointed lecturer on mathematics at Gratz. 

 Students were few, and his duties included the preparation of a 

 yearly almanac, containing, besides what its name implies, a 

 variety of weather predictions and astrological information. 

 "Mother Astronomy," he says, "would surely have to suffer 

 hunger if the daughter Astrology did not earn their bread." 



Becoming thus more interested in astronomy, "there were," he 

 says, " three things in particular : viz., the number, the size, and 

 the motion of the heavenly bodies, as to which I searched zealously 

 for reasons why they were as they were and not otherwise." The 

 first result which seemed to him important, though somewhat 

 fantastic from our standpoint, was a crude correspondence be- 



