JOHANNES KEPLER 41 



and for long had no equal. Nothing was added to this body 

 of knowledge for seventy years, until Newton with his 

 discovery of universal gravitation, based upon Kepler's 

 work, made a further advance of comprehensive importance 

 into the unknown. 



Kepler was free from the persecution which Galileo had 

 suffered as a result of his knowledge, since Luther's life-work 

 saved him; he was a Protestant. 



Nevertheless, his life in the land of the thirty years war, 

 which began in his forty-ninth year, was full of misfortune 

 and need, and just because he was a Protestant he was ex- 

 posed to much persecution. 



He came from a family originally noble, but which had 

 fallen to poverty. He was born on the 27th December, 

 1 57 1, at Weil, a town in Wurtemberg,^ the father was mainly 

 absent as a soldier in foreign countries, and Johannes had to 

 help on the farm at home, but was also able to go to school. 

 When it was seen that he was too delicate constitutionally 

 for anything else, he was allowed to study at the University 

 of Tubingen, which he attended from his sixteenth year, 

 and where he actually received a stipend on account of his 

 good work at school. He was fortunate enough to find there 

 a splendid teacher of mathematics in the person of MSstlin, 

 who also taught him the work of Copernicus, though even in 

 Tubingen at that time, they hardly dared to recognise it too 

 openly. 2 After two years he obtained his degree with dis- 

 tinction. He then proceeded to study theology. But before 

 this study was finished, the opportunity came to him to take a 

 professorship of mathematics at the evangelical school in 

 Graz, and this opportunity he took. At the age of 23 he 

 began his work there, but this also inevitably included making 



^ The town possesses, since the year 1870, a beautiful and worthy 

 statue of Kepler. 



2 Even Luther and Melancthon were its opponents, prejudiced by the 

 Old Testament, but they did not make use of the power of the stake to 

 enforce their views. 



