other place, preferring his heavenly and sublime endeavours even to his native soil, and remembering that—
"Undique terra infra, cœlum patet undique supra
Et patria est forti quælibet ora viro."[1]
After the illustrated description of instruments follows a short account of six smaller portable instruments and an engraving and description of the great globe. Tycho next gives a sketch of his life from his youth onwards, his travels, and how he became settled at Hveen, and passes in review the principal results of his observations;[2] the improved elements of the solar orbit; the discovery of a new inequality in the moon's motion; the variability of the inclination of the lunar orbit and of the motion of the nodes; the observed accurate positions of a thousand fixed stars; the explosion of the time-honoured error about the irregularity in the precession of the equinoxes (trepidatio); the accumulation of a vast mass of carefully planned observations of the planets in order to have new tables of their motions constructed; and lastly, the observations of comets proving them to be much farther away from the earth than the moon. This was indeed a proud record of the twenty years' work at Hveen, and was sufficient to show the world that Tycho Brahe was worthy to rank with Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and Copernicus.
After this review of his labours, Tycho prints a letter from the late Imperial Vice-Chancellor Curtius and several from Magini,[3] and a short abstract of a letter from Padua (of December 1592), "from a certain Doctor of Medicine then staying there" (he did not like to add, "of the name of Gellius"). From this it appeared that the Government of
