78 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. pt. hi. 



it), which was published in 1600, must be remembered as 

 the earhest beginning of the study of electricity. 



Tycho Brahe, Astronomer, 1546-1601. — We must now 

 return to Astronomy, in which during the next eighty years 

 wonderful discoveries were made by three celebrated men, 

 Tycho Brahe the Dane, Galileo the Italian, and Kepler the 

 German. 



Tycho Brahe was bom in the year 1546, at Helsinborg, 

 a town in Sweden, which at that time belonged to the Danes. 

 When he was only fourteen he was so much astonished that 

 the astronomers had been able to foretell exactly the 

 moment when an eclipse of the sun took place in 1560, 

 that he determined to learn this wonderful science, which 

 could predict events. His father had intended him to be a 

 lawyer, but Tycho bought a globe and books with his own 

 money, and studied astronomy in secret; till at last his 

 family consented to let him follow his own inclination, and 

 from that time he gave himself up to that science, planning 

 and making the most beautiful instruments for taking obser- 

 vations in the heavens. 



At this time the theory of Copernicus had made very 

 little impression, and Tycho Brahe rejected it altogether 

 and made a theory of his own called the Tych&nic system, 

 which was, however, soon laid aside and forgotten. This, 

 however, mattered very little, for the useful work which 

 Tycho did was not to lay down new laws, but to collect an 

 immense number of accurate facts which were invaluable to 

 the astronomers who came after him. For twenty-five years 

 he lived in the little island of Huen, in the Baltic, which 

 the King, Frederick II. of Denmark, had given him, 

 making accurate observations of the different movements of 

 the planets, and determining the positions of the fixed stars, 



I 



