THE St-> 3 SPOTS. 



367 



Universe* were not first observed by Galileo, Scheiner, or 

 Harriot, but by John Fabricius of East Friesland, who also 

 was the first to describe, in a printed work, the phenomenon 

 he had seen. Both this discoverer and Galileo, as may be 

 seen by his letter to the Principe Cesi (25th of May, 1612), 

 were aware that the spots belonged to the body of the Sun 

 itself ; but ten or twenty years later, Jean Tarde, a canon of 

 Sarlat. and a Belgian Jesuit, maintained almost simultaneously 

 that the Sun's spots were the transits of small planets. The 

 one named them Sidera Borbonia, the other, Sidera Aus- 

 triaca. 9 Scheiner was the first who employed blue and green 



" around the ever-changing pole of the Universe." Cusa did 

 not. therefore, hold the Copernican views, as has been so 

 successfully shown by Dr. Clemens' discovery in the hospital 

 at Cues,* of the fragmentary notice written in the Cardinal's 

 own hand in 1444. 



* Cosmos, vol. ii. pp. 706-708. 



* Borbonia Sidera. id est, planetaB qui Solis lumina circum- 

 volitant motu proprio et regulari, falso hactenus ab helio- 

 scopis maculaB Solis nuncupati, ex novis observationibus 

 Joaunis Tarde, 1620. Austriaca Sidera heliocyclica astro- 

 nomicis hypothesibus illigata opera Caroli Malapertii BelgaB 

 Montensis e Societate Jesu, 1633. The latter work has at 

 all events the merit of affording observations of a succession 

 of spots between 1618 and 1626. This period includes the 

 years for which Scheiner published his own observations at 

 Rome in his Rosa Ursina.. The Canon Tarde believes those 

 appearances to be the transits of small planets, because 

 '* 1'ceil du monde ne peut avoir des ophthalmies," " the eye of 

 the universe cannot experience ophthalmia." It must justly 

 excite surprise, that the meritorious observer, Gascoigne (see 

 p. 79) should twenty years after Tarde's notice of the Borbonic 

 satellites, still have ascribed the Sun's spots to a conjunction 

 of numerous planetary bodies revolving round the Sun in 

 close proximity to it and in almost intersecting orbits, 

 Several of these bodies, placed, as it were, one over another, 

 were supposed to occasion the blac^ shadows. (Philos, 



