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74 The oration begins with an allusion to his having been requested to lecture, not only by his friends, but also by the King, and then goes on to describe the various branches of mathematics cultivated by the ancients. Geometry has a higher purpose than merely measuring land, and the divine Plato turned all those away from his teaching who were ignorant of geometry, as being unfit to devote themselves to other branches of philosophy. To this he attributes the high degree of learning reached by the ancient philosophers, as they were imbued with geometry from their childhood, "while we, unfortunately, have to spend the best years of our youth on the study of languages and grammar, which those acquired in infancy without trouble." Astronomy is a very ancient science, and, according to Josephus, it can be traced back to the time of Seth, while Abraham from the motions of the sun, moon, and stars perceived that there was but one God, by whose will all was governed. It was next studied by the Egyptians; while we owe our knowledge, above all, to Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and more recently to Nicolaus Copernicus, who not without reason has been called a second Ptolemy, and who, having by his own observations found both the Ptolemean and the Alphonsine theories insufficient to explain the celestial motions, by new hypotheses deduced by the admirable skill of his genius, restored the science to such an extent, that nobody before him had a more accurate knowledge of the motions of the stars. And though his theory was somewhat contrary to physical principles, it admitted nothing contrary to mathematical axioms, such as the ancients did in assuming the motions