Hveen his tenants complained of work which he illegally forced from them; chapel services which his canonry required him to keep up were neglected, and he entirely refused to make certain recognised payments to the widow of the previous canon. Further difficulties arose out of a lighthouse, the maintenance of which was a duty attached to one of his estates, but was regularly neglected. Nothing shews the King's good feeling towards Tycho more than the trouble which he took to settle these quarrels, often ending by paying the sum of money under dispute. Tycho was moreover extremely jealous of his scientific reputation, and on more than one occasion broke out into violent abuse of some assistant or visitor whom he accused of stealing his ideas and publishing them elsewhere.
In addition to the time thus spent in quarrelling, a good deal must have been occupied in entertaining the numerous visitors whom his fame attracted, and who included, in addition to astronomers, persons of rank such as several of the Danish royal family and James VI. of Scotland (afterwards James I. of England).
Notwithstanding these distractions, astronomical work made steady progress, and during the 21 years that Tycho spent at Hveen he accumulated, with the help of pupils and assistants, a magnificent series of observations, far transcending in accuracy and extent anything that had been accomplished by his predecessors. A good deal of attention was also given to alchemy, and some to medicine. He seems to have been much impressed with the idea of the unity of Nature, and to have been continually looking out for analogies or actual connection between the different subjects which he studied.
103. In 1577 appeared a brilliant comet, which Tycho observed with his customary care; and, although he had not at the time his full complement of instruments, his observations were exact enough to satisfy him that the comet was at least three times as far off as the moon, and thus to refute the popular belief, which he had himself held a few years before (§ 100), that comets were generated in our atmosphere. His observations led him also to the belief that the comet was revolving round the sun, at a distance from it greater than that of Venus, a conclusion
