TYCHO BRAKE 19 



to undermine his position at the court; so he decided to leave 

 his Uranienburg, and Denmark itself. Thereafter the ob- 

 servatory soon fell into ruin. After two years of life in 

 straitened circumstances, mainly in Rostock, Tycho at last 

 succeeded in finding a new opening. He established a 

 connection with the Emperor Rudolf and became his astron- 

 omer, astrologer, and alchemist. He was given a house in 

 Prague, and the Schloss Benach near Prague to live in, and 

 sufficient means to build a new observatory. But he was 

 only to enjoy this new field of work for a single year. He 

 died after a short illness at the age of only 55 years. His 

 rich observational material was passed to Johannes Kepler, 

 who was his assistant in Prague. We are told that one of his 

 last remarks was 'Ne frustra vixisse videar' (May I not seem 

 to have lived in vain). 



Tycho was not merely the exact astronomical observer 

 Though the actual application of his life work on the planet- 

 ary motions was reserved for Kepler, he nevertheless himself 

 drew very important conclusions. His first essay, which 

 made him widely known, related to the new star which 

 suddenly appeared in 1572, and was discovered by him; he 

 decided from the want of proper motion of this star, that it 

 belonged to the fixed stars, and emphatically stated that the 

 world beyond the planets cannot by any means be unchange- 

 able, as was then generally assumed. He also observed 

 comets. He noticed that the position of a comet among the 

 stars is the same for observers on the earth very widely 

 separated from one another, and concluded from this that 

 comets are very distant heavenly bodies, and not, as had been 

 hitherto assumed, luminous formations in the earth's atmo- 

 sphere. 



He further found from the motions of the comets that their 

 paths extend from very far away to very near the sun, which 

 clearly showed that the space of the heavens allows of free 

 motion between all these orbits of the planets. There was 



