is not without merit. Thus prepared, he was sent to Copenhagen in April 1559 to study at the University there.[1] This seat of learning had been founded in the year 1479 by permission of the Pope, but it had languished for a number of years for want of money and good teachers. The confiscation of the property of the monasteries enabled King Christian III. to commence improving it, and by the statutes of 1539 (which were still in force in Tycho Brahe's time) the number of professors was fixed at fourteen, three of Divinity, one of Law, two of Medicine, and eight in the Faculty of Arts, among whom were several whose names were honourably known outside their own country. Tycho now commenced his studies here, devoting himself specially to rhetorics and philosophy, as being the branches of learning most necessary to the career of a statesman, for which he was destined by his uncle, and probably also by his father, who had at first objected to his receiving a classical education.[2] But astronomy very soon claimed his attention. On the 21st of August 1560 an eclipse of the sun took place, which was total in Portugal, and of which Clavius has left us a graphic description. Though it was only a small eclipse at Copenhagen, it attracted the special attention of the youthful student, who had already begun to take some interest in the astrological predictions or horoscopes which in those days formed daily topics of conversation. When he saw the eclipse take place at the predicted time, it struck him "as something divine that men could know the motions of the stars so accurately that
- ↑ In those days students frequently entered a university at a very early age, and with an exceedingly slender stock of knowledge. At Wittenberg one of the professors in the Faculty of Arts was bound to teach the junior students Latin grammar, and one of the Wittenberg professors in his opening address pointed out how simple the rudiments of arithmetic were, and how even multiplication and division might be learned with some diligence. Prowe, Nic. Coppernicus, i. p. 116
- ↑ Gassendi, p. 4.
