672 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



investigations under the rigid but salutary yoke of the sciences of num- 

 ber and of space. 



In England the same impidse made itself felt, although, amid the 

 religious troubles of the time, its effects were at first obscure and in- 

 termittent. It is, however, much to the credit of our national sagacity 

 and boldness that, within a few years of the publication of Copernicus's 

 great work, three Englishmen were found to advocate doctrines so 

 novel, so startling, and so repugnant to ordinary experience as those 

 contained in it. The introduction into England of the new views in 

 astronomy was, in all probability, due to the notorious Dr. John Dee, 

 the favored soothsayer of Elizabeth and Leicester, whose reputation 

 as a mathematician has been eclipsed by his fame as a magician. His 

 career aptly illustrates an old proverb, exhibiting the evil effects on 

 later life of a bad name gratuitously bestowed in youth. The suspi- 

 cions roused by his ingenious contrivance of an automaton-scarabaeus, 

 which, during a performance of the " Pax " of Aristophanes, visibly 

 mounted upward carrying a man and a basket on its back, seem to 

 have tickled his inordinate vanity, and, more than thirty years later, 

 he hired a certain Edward Kelly to instruct him in occult arts at a sal- 

 ary of fifty pounds a year. Himself a dupe, he was the fitter to dupe 

 others; and succeeded for a time in imposing his pretensions on several 

 of the greatest personages in Europe. At length he and his spiritual- 

 istic pedagogue were compelled to retire to the castle of Trebonia, in 

 Bohemia, where Kelly's supposed mastery of the great alchemistic se- 

 cret procured them such affluence that, according to the popular belief, 

 Dee's young son was accustomed to play at quoits with gold produced 

 by means of the "philosophical powder of projection." "Finally, the 

 confederates quarreled; Dee was recalled to England by Elizabeth, and 

 receiving, after the manner of that princess, more promises than pay, 

 died in poverty in the fifth year of her successor. He left, for the 

 benefit of posterity, a detailed record of his supernatural communica- 

 tions ; and the magic crystal which he professed to have received from 

 the hand of an angel may still be seen, together with Robert Burns's 

 jmnch-bowl, and a casket carved out of Shakespeare's walnut-tree, 

 among the curiosities preserved in the British Museum. 



It is, however, as an astronomer, not as a spiritualist, that we have 

 to do with him. In 1547, four years after the promulgation of the Co- 

 pernican theoiy, he visited the Low Countries for scientific purposes, 

 and subsequently lectured and studied at the Universities of Paris and 

 Lou vain. We may safely conclude that he there acquired the convic- 

 tions which led him to instigate, and patronize with a preface, the pub- 

 lication of John Field's "Ephemeris" for 1557, juxta Copernici et 

 Heinholdi canones. This performance has earned for Field the title 

 of the " Proto-Copernican of England," justly due, no doubt, to the 

 first English astronomer who adopted, ex professo, the heliocentric 

 theory of the solar system. But, in a book which appeared probably 



