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154 by distributing the houses evenly round the equator and round the ecliptic. In the preface he talks about the possibility of averting the inclinations of the stars in the same strain as before, and throughout the whole dissertation he seems more doubtful about the results to be expected than he was in 1577. He has again corrected the places of the planets by his own observations. Mercury is here the strongest planet, free from the rays of the sun, though somewhat weakened by being retrograde and moving slowly, but particularly by being in the sixth house. The prince seems only to have "mediocre" luck in store, but Tycho remarks that everybody shapes his own fortune.

That Tycho did not take much interest in nor attach any importance to these astrological prognostications will be evident to anybody who has read the foregoing pages. Whatever he had thought about these matters in his youth, the great work of his life now stood so clearly before him, that he did not care to waste his time on work of so very doubtful value as astrological forecasts. We possess even stronger testimony to this effect than any we have yet quoted, in a letter which he wrote on the 7th December 1587 to Heinrich von Below, a nobleman from Mecklenburg, who in 1579, through the queen's influence, had received an estate in Jutland in fief, and who was married to a first cousin of Tycho's. Duke Ulrich of Mecklenburg-Güstrow,