Page:Mathematical collections and translations, in two tomes - Salusbury (1661).djvu/284



These are twelve indagations made by the Author at his election, amongst many which, as he saith, might be made by combining the observations of these thirteen observators. The which twelve we may believe to be the most favourable to prove his intention.

I would know whether amongst the so many other indagations pretermitted by the Author, there were not some that made against him, that is, from which calculating one might find the new star to have been above the Moon, as at the very first sight I think we may reasonably question; in regard I see these already produced to be so different from one another, that some of them give me the distance of the said star from the Earth, 4, 6, 10, 100, a thousand, and an hundred thousand times bigger one than another; so that I may well suspect that amongst those that he did not calculate, there was some one in fauour of the adverse party. And I guesse this to be the more probable, for that I cannot conceive that those Astronomers the observators could want the knowledg and practice of rhese computations, which I think do not depend upon the abstrucest things in the World. And indeed it will seem to me a thing more than miraculous, if whilst in these twelve investigations onely, there are some that make the star to be distant from the Earth but a few miles, and others that make it to be but a very fmall matter below the Moon, there are none to be found that in favour of the contrary part do make it so much as twenty yards above the Lunar Orb. And that which shall be yet again more extravagant, that all those Astronomers should have been so blind as not to have discovered that their so apparent mistake.

Begin now to prepare your ears to hear with infinite admiration to what excesses of confidence of ones own authority and others folly, the desire of contradicting and shewing ones self wiser than others, transports a man. Amongst the indagations omitted by the Author, there are such to be found as make the new star not onely above the Moon, but above the fixed stars also. And these are not a few, but the greater part, as you shall see in this other paper, where I have set them down.

But what saith the Author to these? It may be he did not think of them?

He hath thought of them but too much: but saith, that the observations upon which the calculations make the star to be infinitely remote, are erroneous, and that they cannot be combined to one another.