astronomer of note who at once accepted the new views was his friend and colleague Erasmus Reinhold (born at Saalfeld in 1511), who occupied the chief chair of mathematics and astronomy at Wittenberg from 1536 to 1553, and it thus happened, curiously enough, that the doctrines so emphatically condemned by two of the great Protestant leaders were championed principally in what was generally regarded as the very centre of Protestant thought.
94. Rheticus, after the publication of the Narratio Prima and of an Ephemeris or Almanack based on Coppernican principles (1550), occupied himself principally with the calculation of a very extensive set of mathematical tables, which he only succeeded in finishing just before his death in 1576.
Reinhold rendered to astronomy the extremely important service of calculating, on the basis of the De Revolutionibus, tables of the motions of the celestial bodies, which were published in 1551 at the expense of Duke Albert of Prussia and hence called Tabulæ Prutenicæ, or Prussian Tables. Reinhold revised most of the calculations made by Coppernicus, whose arithmetical work was occasionally at fault; but the chief object of the tables was the development in great detail of the work in the De Revolutionibus, in such a form that the places of the chief celestial bodies at any required time could be ascertained with ease. The author claimed for his tables that from them the places of all the heavenly bodies could be computed for the past 3,000 years, and would agree with all observations recorded during that period. The tables were indeed found to be on the whole decidedly superior to their predecessors the Alfonsine Tables (chapter iii., § 66), and gradually came more and more into favour, until superseded three-quarters of a century later by the Rudolphine Tables of Kepler (chapter vii., § 148). This superiority of the new tables was only indirectly connected with the difference in the principles on which the two sets of tables were based, and was largely due to the facts that Reinhold was a much better computer than the assistants of Alfonso, and that Coppernicus, if not a better mathematician than Ptolemy, at any rate had better mathematical tools at command. Nevertheless the
