doubt, and it is curious that the book in which we read this, though printed in Denmark, should eventually come to be published at Prague (where the religious war which he foretold raged furiously less than twenty years after his death) and was dedicated to the Roman Emperor! But it is more curious still that some of his other predictions seem to be fulfilled in the person of Gustavus Adolphus, the greatest champion of Protestantism in the seventeenth century. He was born in 1594 (only two years after the influence of the star should begin to be felt), and his glory was greatest in the year in which he fell, 1632, the very year mentioned by Tycho. He certainly was not born in Finland (for it is Finland and not the adjoining part of Russia which is indicated by 16° east of Uraniborg and 62° Latitude), but in Stockholm; but Finland was still a province of Sweden, and the yellow Finnish regiments were conspicuous for their bravery on many a blood-stained battlefield in Germany. No wonder that many contemporaries of Gustavus Adolphus were startled by these coincidences, and that the concluding part of Tycho's book was translated into several languages.[1] But the star had a truer mission than that of announcing the arrival of an impossible golden age. It roused to unwearied exertions a great astronomer, it caused him to renew astronomy in all its branches by showing the world how little it knew about the heavens; his work became the foundation on which Kepler and Newton
- ↑ I possess an English translation which seems to be very scarce: "Learned Tico Brahæ his astronomicall Coniectur of the new and much Admired * which Appered in the year 1572," London, 1632, 26 pp. text, 5 pp. dedication ("To the High and Mighty Emperour Rvdolphvs the II. The Preface of the Heyres to Tycho Brahe"), and 2 pp. of epigrams by the translator and James VI. I have seen another copy in which there was a portrait of Gustavus Adolphus. Lalande has a German translation also printed in 1632, and there is a Dutch one printed at Goude in 1648 ("Generale Prognosticatie van het jaer 1572 tot desen tegenwoordigen Jare, alles in Latijn beschreven van Ticho Brahe") in the library of Trin. Coll., Dublin.
