thin gilt brass plates, on which the stars and the equator and colures were marked. It was not finished when Tycho left Augsburg; but Paul Hainzel, who was under great obligations to him for having designed the quadrant and given him the newly-constructed sextant, readily undertook to superintend the completion of it.
At Augsburg Tycho made the acquaintance of Pierre de la Ramée, or Petrus Ramus, Professor of Philosophy and Rhetoric at the College Royal at Paris, who had been obliged to leave France several times owing to his adherence to the Huguenot party, and the odium he had drawn on himself by his opposition to the then all-powerful Aristotelean philosophy. He wanted to discourage the exclusive study of this time-honoured system of philosophy, now worn to a shadow, which had become a mere cloak for stagnation, bigotry, and ignorance, and to introduce in its place the study of mathematics in the University of Paris. But his zeal only procured him much enmity and persecution; he had to apologise for his abuse of the Peripatetic philosophy before the Parliament of Paris, and by sentence of special royal commissioners appointed to investigate the matter, Aristotle was reinstated as the infallible guide to learning. Ramus had therefore for a while withdrawn from France, but, unluckily for himself, he returned in 1571, and perished the following year in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. This man, who was naturally inclined to hail with pleasure a rising star in a science closely allied to his own, happened to be at Augsburg in 1570, and became acquainted with Tycho Brahe through Hieronymus Wolf, a man of great learning, especially in the classical languages, and himself drawn to Tycho by his love of astrology. Having been invited by Hainzel to inspect the great quadrant, Ramus expressed his admiration of this important undertaking, so successfully carried out by a young man only twenty-three
