investigations under the rigid but salutary yoke of the sciences of number and of space.
In England the same impulse made itself felt, although, amid the religious troubles of the time, its effects were at first obscure and intermittent. It is, however, much to the credit of our national sagacity and boldness that, within a few years of the publication of Copernicus's great work, three Englishmen were found to advocate doctrines so novel, so startling, and so repugnant to ordinary experience as those contained in it. The introduction into England of the new views in astronomy was, in all probability, due to the notorious Dr. John Dee, the favored soothsayer of Elizabeth and Leicester, whose reputation as a mathematician has been eclipsed by his fame as a magician. His career aptly illustrates an old proverb, exhibiting the evil effects on later life of a bad name gratuitously bestowed in youth. The suspicions roused by his ingenious contrivance of an automaton-scarabæus, which, during a performance of the "Pax" of Aristophanes, visibly mounted upward carrying a man and a basket on its back, seem to have tickled his inordinate vanity, and, more than thirty years later, he hired a certain Edward Kelly to instruct him in occult arts at a salary of fifty pounds a year. Himself a dupe, he was the fitter to dupe others; and succeeded for a time in imposing his pretensions on several of the greatest personages in Europe. At length he and his spiritualistic pedagogue were compelled to retire to the castle of Trebonia, in Bohemia, where Kelly's supposed mastery of the great alchemistic secret procured them such affluence that, according to the popular belief, Dee's young son was accustomed to play at quoits with gold produced by means of the "philosophical powder of projection." Finally, the confederates quarreled; Dee was recalled to England by Elizabeth, and receiving, after the manner of that princess, more promises than pay, died in poverty in the fifth year of her successor. He left, for the benefit of posterity, a detailed record of his supernatural communications; and the magic crystal which he professed to have received from the hand of an angel may still be seen, together with Robert Burns's punch-bowl, and a casket carved out of Shakespeare's walnut-tree, among the curiosities preserved in the British Museum.
It is, however, as an astronomer, not as a spiritualist, that we have to do with him. In 1547, four years after the promulgation of the Copernican theory, he visited the Low Countries for scientific purposes, and subsequently lectured and studied at the Universities of Paris and Lou vain. We may safely conclude that he there acquired the convictions which led him to instigate, and patronize with a preface, the publication of John Field's "Ephemeris" for 1557, juxta Copernici et Heinholdi canones. This performance has earned for Field the title of the "Proto-Copernican of England," justly due, no doubt, to the first English astronomer who adopted, ex professo, the heliocentric theory of the solar system. But, in a book which appeared probably
