True to the family tradition, young Tyge was intended to take up the career of a statesman, and was accordingly sent at thirteen to study rhetorics and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. But at the end of his first year, he witnessed an event which made an overwhelming impression on him and decided the whole future course of his life. It was a partial eclipse of the sun which, of course, had been announced beforehand, and it struck the boy as ‘something divine that men could know the motions of the stars so accurately that they were able a long time beforehand to predict their places
...more
