(or at least the outlines of them) were afterwards incorporated in Tycho's first volume of Progymnasmata.
When Rothmann had received the book he wrote to Tycho to thank him for it, and remarked that the new system of the world seemed to be the same as one which the Landgrave a few years previously had got his instrument-maker to represent by a planetarium.[1] Tycho, who had kept his system a deep secret until the book was ready, was at first unable to understand from whom the Landgrave could have got a description of it,[2] but he soon after received from a correspondent in Germany a recently published book which solved the riddle. The title of the book was Nicolai Raymari Ursi Dithmarsi Fundamentum astronomicum, printed at Strassburg in 1588. The author, Nicolai Reymers Bär, was a native of Ditmarschen, in the west of Holstein, and a son of very poor parents. He is even said to have earned his bread as a swineherd, but possessing great natural abilities, he rapidly acquired considerable knowledge both in science and in classics. In 1580 he published a Latin Grammar, and in 1583, at Leipzig, a Geodaesia Ranzoviana, dedicated to his patron, Heinrich Rantzov, Governor of Holstein.[3] Having for some time worked as a surveyor, he seems to have entered the service of a Danish nobleman, Erik Lange of Engelholm, in Jutland, who was a devoted student of alchemy. Lange went on a visit to Tycho in September 1584, and brought Reymers with him, but this probably somewhat uncouth self-taught man seems to have been treated with but scant civility
- ↑ Epist. astron., pp. 128, 129.
- ↑ So Tycho says in his reply to Rothmann (Epist., p. 149), but before Rothmann's letter was written Tycho had in his letter to Peucer (dated 13th September 1588) mentioned that a German mathematician had two years previously heard of the system "per quendam meum fugitivum ministrum" (Weistritz, i. p. 255), and this he also mentions in the letter to Rothmann.
- ↑ Kästner, Geschichte der Mathematik, i. p. 669; Kepleri Opera ed. Frisch, i. p. 218.
