Abstract
ON October 23, 1635, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, Wilhelm Schickard, a famous German orientalist and astronomer, died of the plague at Tubingen. Schickard was born on April 22, 1592, at Herrenberg, Wiirttemberg. He was educated for the church, and at an early age became known for his knowledge of Hebrew. At the age of twenty-seven years he was appointed to the chair of Hebrew at Tubingen, and in 1631 was made professor of astronomy. He was also an inspector of schools at Stuttgart. In some of his least-known books are to be found early observations on the aurora, an account of the comet of 1623 which caused considerable commotion on its appearance, and his views on the refraction of light and the theory of the rainbow. He was known to both Kepler and Gassendi, and the latter, after he had observed at Paris the transit of Mercury of 1631 predicted by Kepler, wrote to Schickard: “The crafty god had sought to deceive astronomers by passing over the sun a little earlier than was expected, and had drawn a veil of dark clouds over the earth in order to make his escape more effectual. But Apollo, acquainted with his knavish tricks from his infancy, would not allow him to pass altogether unnoticed. To be brief, I have been more fortunate than those hunters after Mercury who have sought the cunning god in the sun. I found him out, and saw him, where no one else had hitherto seen him.” Gassendi, in another letter of the same year, gave an account to Schickard of his fruitless efforts to see the transit of Venus.
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Tercentenary of Wilhelm Schickard (1592–1635). Nature 136, 636 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136636a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136636a0