aspects, with which not only Tycho, but most thinkers of the Middle Ages were imbued.[1] On both these vignettes is seen a man in a reclining posture, with a boy at his side; but in the one case the man is leaning on a globe and holds a pair of compasses in his hand, while his face is turned upward; in the other case he has at his side some chemical apparatus, and holds in his hand a bunch of herbs, while the snake of Æsculapius is coiled round his arm, and he is looking downwards. At the sides of the former picture is the motto, "Suspiciendo despicio;" round the latter, "Despiciendo suspicio," expressing beautifully the mystical reciprocal action and sympathy between the "æthereal and elementary worlds." In a letter to Rothmann, Tycho enters at some length on this subject, but his remarks contain nothing which may not be read in any book of the time in which the "occult philosophy" is taught, and we have already sufficiently alluded to these matters in previous chapters. He mentions the principal authors whom he has followed,[2] but adds that Paracelsus has truly said that nobody knows more in this art than what he has experienced himself per ignem, for which reason he cultivates the "terrestrial astronomy" with the same assiduity as the celestial. In the laboratory Tycho also occupied himself with the preparation of medicine, and as he distributed his remedies without payment, it is not
- ↑ These vignettes seem first to have been used for a poem to a friend of Tycho's, Falk Gjöe, printed at Uraniborg between 1584 and 1587, and of which I am not aware that any copy now exists. Rothmann came across a copy at Frankfurt, and asked Tycho to explain the vignettes. Epist. Astron., p. 89; Tycho's reply, ibid., p. 115-117.
- ↑ Among these are Hermes Trismegistus, Geber, Arnoldus de Villa Nova, Raymundus Lullius, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, &c. He does not allude to the fact that the idea expressed in the two vignettes occurs already in the second of the thirteen sentences of the so-called Hermes Trismegistus: "What is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing" (see Nature, vii. p. 90). There is, however, an allusion to this sentence in Epist. Astron., p.164.
