138 A Short History of Astronomy [CH V. 



stars which the Coppernican system required, because a vast 

 empty space would be left between them and the planets, 

 a space which he regarded as wasteful.* Biblical difficul- 

 ties t also had some weight with him. He accordingly 

 devised (1583) a new system according to which the five 

 planets revolved round the sun (c, in fig. 52), while the sun 

 revolved annually round the earth (A), and the whole celestial 

 sphere performed also a daily revolution round the earth. 

 The system was never worked out in detail, and, like many 

 compromises, met with little support ; Tycho nevertheless 

 was extremely proud of it, and one of the most violent and 

 prolonged quarrels of his life (lasting a dozen years) was with 

 Reymers Bar or Ursus (?-i6oo), who had communicated 

 to the Landgrave in 1586 and published two years later a 

 system of the world very like Tycho's. Reymers had been 

 at Hveen for a short time in 1584, and Tycho had no hesita- 

 tion in accusing him of having stolen the idea from some 

 manuscript seen there. Reymers naturally retaliated with 

 a counter-charge of theft against Tycho. There is, how- 

 ever, no good reason why the idea should not have occurred 

 independently to each astronomer ; and Reymers made in 

 some respects a great improvement on Tycho's scheme by 

 accepting the daily rotation of the earth, and so doing 

 away with the daily rotation of the celestial sphere, which 

 was certainly one of the weakest parts of the Ptolemaic 

 scheme. 



1 06. The same year (1588) which saw the publication of 

 Tycho's book on the comet was also marked by the death 

 of his patron, Frederick II. The new King Christian was 

 a boy of IT, and for some years the country was managed 

 by four leading statesmen. The new government seems to 

 have been at first quite friendly to Tycho ; a large sum was 

 paid to him for expenses incurred at Hveen, and additional 

 endowments were promised, but as time went on Tycho's 

 usual quarrels with his tenants and others began to produce 



* It would be interesting to know what use he assigned to the 

 (presumably) still vaster space beyond the stars. 



j- Tycho makes in this connection the delightful remark that 

 Moses must have been a skilled astronomer, because he refers to 

 the moon as "the lesser light," notwithstanding the fact thrt the 

 apparent diameters of sun and moon are very nearly equal ! 



