_From a Picture in the Collection of Godefroy Kraenner, Merchant at Ratisbon._
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
_London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street, & Pall Mall East._ ]
The matter contained in this sketch of Kepler’s history, is exclusively derived from the Life published in the Library of Useful Knowledge. To that work we refer all readers who wish to make themselves acquainted with the contents of Kepler’s writings, and with the singular methods by which he was led to his great discoveries: it will be evident, on inspection, that it would be useless to attempt farther compression of the scientific matter therein contained. Our object therefore will be to select such portions as may best illustrate his singular and enthusiastic mind, and to give a short account of his not uneventful life.
John Kepler was born December 21, 1571, Long. 29° 7´, Lat. 48° 54´, as we are carefully informed by his earliest biographer Hantsch. It is well to add that on the spot thus astronomically designated as our astronomer’s birth-place, stands the city of Weil, in the Duchy of Wirtemberg. Kepler was first sent to school at Elmendingen, where his father, a soldier of honourable family, but indigent circumstances, kept a tavern: his education was completed at the monastic school of Maulbronn, and the college of Tubingen, where he took his Master’s degree in 1591. About the same time he was offered the astronomical lectureship at Gratz, in Styria: and he accepted the post by advice, and almost by compulsion, of his tutors, “better furnished,” he says, “with talent than knowledge, and with many protestations that I was not abandoning my claim to be provided for in some other more brilliant profession.” Though well skilled in mathematics, and devoted to the study of philosophy, he had felt hitherto no especial vocation to astronomy, although he had become strongly impressed with the truth of the Copernican system, and had defended it publicly in the schools of Tubingen. He was much engrossed by inquiries of a very different character: and it is fortunate for his fame that circumstances withdrew him from the mystical pursuits to which through life he was more or less addicted; from such profitless toil as the “examination of the nature of heaven, of souls, of genii, of the elements, of the essence of fire, of the cause of fountains, of the ebb and flow of the tide, the shape of the continents and inland seas, and things of this sort,” to which, he says, he had devoted much time. The sort of spirit in which he was likely to enter on the more occult of these inquiries, and the sort of agency to which he was likely to ascribe the natural phenomena of which he speaks, may be estimated from an opinion which he gravely advanced in mature years and established fame, that the earth is an enormous living animal, with passions and affections analogous to those of the creatures which live on its surface. “The earth is not an animal like a dog, ready at every nod; but more like a bull or an elephant, slow to become angry, and so much the more furious when incensed.” “If any one who has climbed the peaks of the highest mountains throw a stone down their very deep clefts, a sound is heard from them; or if he throw it into one of the mountain lakes, which beyond doubt are bottomless, a storm will immediately arise, just as when you thrust a straw into the ear or nose of a ticklish animal, it shakes its head, and runs shuddering away. What so like breathing, especially of those fish who draw water into their mouths, and spout it out again through their gills, as that wonderful tide! For although it is so regulated according to the course of the moon, that in the preface to my ‘Commentaries on Mars’ I have mentioned it as probable that the waters are attracted by the moon, as iron is by the loadstone, yet if any one uphold that the earth regulates its breathing according to the motion of the sun and moon, as animals have daily and nightly alternations of sleep and waking, I shall not think his philosophy unworthy of being listened to; especially if any flexible parts should be discovered in the depths of the earth to supply the functions of lungs or gills.”