NEW, VARIABLE, AND COMPOUND STARS. 167 



of Tycho Brahe. The new star, which glowed with great splendour, and continued visible 

 for eighteen months, appeared in Cassiopeia immediately under the scabellum or chair of 

 ^^ the Lady. It was first caught sight of at Wittemburg on 

 August 6th, seen at Augsburg on the 7th, observed by Corne- 

 lius Gemma on November 9th, and by Tycho on the llth. It 

 formed an irregular square with three of the principal stars of 

 the constellation, maintained the same position invariably with 

 respect to them during the whole time of its apparition, ex- 

 hibited no sensible parallax, which plainly declared its place 

 to be in the region of the fixed stars. In the diagram, 

 the largest star represents the stranger, with Caph to the 

 left, Schedir above, and y to the right, composing a trapezium. 

 To account for the appearance of this novel object, some 

 philosophers of the time referred it to the Epicurean doctrine 

 ~ of a fortuitous concourse of atoms, whose combination in 

 this stellar form was merely one of the endless varieties of ways in which they have 

 been arranged. Keppler, too enlightened to be attracted by such a worn-out hypothesis 

 when advanced upon a subsequent occasion, thus alludes to it with his characteristic 

 oddity : " When I was a youth, with plenty of idle time on my hands, I was much 

 taken with the vanity, of which some grown men are not ashamed, of making anagrams, 

 by transposing the letters of my name written in Greek so as to make another 

 sentence : out of IwtWjje KeTrXi/poc, I made Setpi'ivwv KairriKoq (the tapster of the 

 Sirens) ; in Latin, out of lohannes Keplerus came Serpens in akuleo (a serpent in his 

 sting). But not being satisfied with the meaning of these words, and being unable to 

 make another, I trusted the thing to chance, and taking out of a pack of playing cards as 

 many as there were letters in the name, wrote one upon each, and then began to shufile 

 them, and then at each shuffle to read them in the order they came, to see if any meaning 

 came of it. Now may all the Epicurean gods and goddesses confound this same chance ! 

 which, although I spent a good deal of time over it, never showed me anything like sense, 

 even at a distance. So I gave up my cards to the Epicurean Eternity, to be carried away 

 into Infinity, and, it is said, they are still flying above there in the utmost confusion 

 among the atoms, and have never yet come to any meaning. I will tell these disputants 

 my opponents, not my own opinion, but my wife's. Yesterday, when weary with 

 writing, and my mind quite dusty with considering these atoms, I was called to supper, 

 and a salad I had asked for was set before me. " It seems then," said I aloud, " that if 

 pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of water, vinegar and oil, and slices 

 of egg, had been flying about in the air from all eternity, it might at last happen by chance 

 that there would come a salad." " Yes," says my wife, " but not one so nice or well dressed 

 as this of mine is." 



The above amusing extract is taken from one of the treatises of this remarkable man, 

 entitled De Stella Nova, a presentation copy of which to our James I. is in the library 

 of the British Museum. It was written upon a new star which blazed forth in the year 

 1604 under somewhat remarkable circumstances. In that year the planets Saturn, Jupiter, 

 and Mars were in conjunction in the three fiery signs Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius, to use 

 the language of astrology, composing the fiery trigon, a phenomenon which occurs about 

 once in every eight hundred years. The scene drew Keppler many a night to the bridge 

 of Prague, his usual place of observation. Towards the close of September he observed 

 the three planets, and on the 29th Mars and Jupiter were in conjunction, and that part 

 of the heavens was attentively watched, but nothing peculiar otherwise was observable. 

 On the 30th a strange object was seen by his scholars at no great distance from Jupiter, 



M 4 



