deal of leisure, which he spent with characteristic energy in acquiring as thorough a knowledge as possible of astronomy, and in speculating on the subject.
According to his own statement, "there were three things in particular, viz. the number, the size, and the motion of the heavenly bodies, as to which he searched zealously for reasons why they were as they were and not otherwise"; and the results of a long course of wild speculation on the subject led him at last to a result with which he was immensely pleased—a numerical relation connecting the distances of the several planets from the sun with certain geometrical bodies known as the regular solids (of which the cube is the best known), a relation which is not very accurate numerically, and is of absolutely no significance or importance.[1] This discovery, together with a detailed account of the steps which led to it, as well as of a number of other steps which led nowhere, was published in 1596 in a book a portion of the title of which may be translated as The Forerunner of Dissertations on the Universe, containing the Mystery of the Universe, commonly referred to as the Mysterium Cosmographicum. The contents were probably much more attractive and seemed more valuable to Kepler's contemporaries than to us, but even to those who were least inclined to attach weight to its conclusions, the book shewed evidence of considerable astronomical knowledge and very great ingenuity; and both Tycho Brahe and Galilei, to whom copies were sent, recognised in the author a rising astronomer likely to do good work.
137. In 1597 Kepler married. In the following year the religious troubles, which had for some years been steadily growing, were increased by the action of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria (afterwards the Emperor Ferdinand II.), who on his return from a pilgrimage to Loretto started a
- ↑ The regular solids being taken in the order: cube, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, octohedron, and of such magnitude that a sphere can be circumscribed to each and at the same time inscribed in the preceding solid of the series, then the radii of the six spheres so obtained were shewn by Kepler to be approximately proportional to the distances from the sun of the six planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury.
