as small as Regulus, and as dull as
Saturn, and disappeared at the end of a few months. It constantly
changed its colour, and was at first tawny, then yellow, then purple and
red, and often white at great altitudes. It had no parallax, and
therefore was a fixed star. Kepler wrote a short account of this
remarkable body, and maintained its superiority to that of 1572, as this
last came in an ordinary year, while the other appeared in the year of
the _fiery trigon_, or that in which Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, are in
the three fiery signs, Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius, an event which
occurs only every 800 years. After discussing a great variety of topics,
but little connected with his subject, and in a style of absurd
jocularity, he attacks the opinions of the Epicureans, that the star was
a fortuitous concourse of atoms, in the following remarkable paragraph,
which is a good specimen of the work:--"When I was a youth with plenty
of idle time on my hands, I was much taken with the vanity, of which
some grown men are not ashamed, of making anagrams by transposing the
letters of my name, written in Latin. Out of _Joannes Keplerus_ came
_Serpens in Akuleo_ (a serpent in his sting); but not being satisfied
with the meaning of these words, and being unable to make another, I
trusted the thing to chance, and taking out of a pack of playing cards
as many as there were letters in the name, I wrote one upon each, and
then began to shuffle them, and at each shuffle to read them in the
order they came, to see if any meaning came of it. Now, may all the
Epicurean gods and goddesses confound this same chance, which, although
I have spent a good deal of time over it, never shewed me anything like
sense even from a distance. So I gave up my cards to the Epicurean
eternity, to be carried away into infinity; and, it is said, they are
still flying about there in the utmost confusion among the atoms, and
have never yet come to any meaning. I will tell those disputants, my
opponents, not my own opinion, but my wife's. Yesterday, when weary with
writing, and my mind quite dusty with considering these atoms, I was
called to supper, and a salad I had asked for was set before me. 'It
seems then,' said I, aloud, 'that if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce,
grains of salt, drops of water, vinegar, and oil, and slices of egg, had
been flying about in the air from all eternity, it might at last happen
by chance that there would come a salad.' 'Yes,' says