It was the wish and the intention of his uncle that Tycho’s education should be specially directed to those branches of rhetoric and philosophy which were then supposed to be a necessary preparation for the career of a statesman.  Tycho, however, speedily made it plain to his teachers that though he was an ardent student, yet the things which interested him were the movements of the heavenly bodies and not the subtleties of metaphysics.

[Plate:  Tycho brahe.]

On the 21st October, 1560, an eclipse of the sun occurred, which was partially visible at Copenhagen.  Tycho, boy though he was, took the utmost interest in this event.  His ardour and astonishment in connection with the circumstance were chiefly excited by the fact that the time of the occurrence of the phenomenon could be predicted with so much accuracy.  Urged by his desire to understand the matter thoroughly, Tycho sought to procure some book which might explain what he so greatly wanted to know.  In those days books of any kind were but few and scarce, and scientific books were especially unattainable.  It so happened, however, that a Latin version of Ptolemy’s astronomical works had appeared a few years before the eclipse took place, and Tycho managed to buy a copy of this book, which was then the chief authority on celestial matters.  Young as the boy astronomer was, he studied hard, although perhaps not always successfully, to understand Ptolemy, and to this day his copy of the great work, copiously annotated and marked by the schoolboy hand, is preserved as one of the chief treasures in the library of the University at Prague.

After Tycho had studied for about three years at the University of Copenhagen, his uncle thought it would be better to send him, as was usual in those days, to complete his education by a course of study in some foreign university.  The uncle cherished the hope that in this way the attention of the young astronomer might be withdrawn from the study of the stars and directed in what appeared to him a more useful way.  Indeed, to the wise heads of those days, the pursuit of natural science seemed so much waste of good time which might otherwise be devoted to logic or rhetoric or some other branch of study more in vogue at that time.  To assist in this attempt to wean Tycho from his scientific tastes, his uncle chose as a tutor to accompany him an intelligent and upright young man named Vedel, who was four years senior to his pupil, and accordingly, in 1562, we find the pair taking up their abode at the University of Leipzig.

The tutor, however, soon found that he had undertaken a most hopeless task.  He could not succeed in imbuing Tycho with the slightest taste for the study of the law or the other branches of knowledge which were then thought so desirable.  The stars, and nothing but the stars, engrossed the attention of his pupil.  We are told that all the money he could obtain was spent secretly in buying astronomical books and instruments.  He learned the name of the stars from a little globe, which he kept hidden from Vedel, and only ventured to use during the latter’s absence.  No little friction was at first caused by all this, but in after years a fast and enduring friendship grew up between Tycho and his tutor, each of whom learned to respect and to love the other.