Wednesday, August 29, 2012

He certainly was not born in Finland

That Tycho when writing of the religion distinguished by pomp and splendour which was soon to disappear was thinking of the Roman Catholic persuasion is beyond a 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.

Tycho Brahe: a picture of scientific life and work in the sixteenth century (1890) by John Louis Emil Dreyer

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