A decorative rectangular woodcut headpiece featuring symmetrical scrolling acanthus leaves, stylized floral motifs, and intertwined vines.

TO THE MOST REVEREND PRIN-

CE, TO THE VERY REVEREND PRE-

LATES; TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS, NOBLE, FREE BA-

rons; To the Noble, Brave, Men of the Knightly Order, the Provincial

Lords of the entire most Splendid Duchy of Sty-

ria; To my most gracious

Lords.

MOST REVEREND Prince; Very Reverend, Illustrious, Noble; Brave, Noble; Most Gracious Lords. This is the twenty-fifth year since I first published among men the present little book, titled The Cosmographic Mystery original: "Mysterium Cosmographicum"; which was dedicated original: "inscriptum" to the officials of that time, chosen from the most honorable body of your community. Even though I was then quite a young man, and was publishing this first trial tyrocinium: a "novice's trial" or "first fruits" of one's professional work of the astronomical profession: yet the successes of the following times testify with a loud voice that no trial was ever more admirable, none more fortunate, and none, certainly, placed in more worthy matter by anyone. For it should not be considered a mere invention of my own mind (let boastfulness be absent from my words, and wonder from the reader's senses, while we touch the seven-stringed psaltery psalterium heptachordum: a reference to the "music of the spheres," where the seven known planets of the time were seen as strings on a divine musical instrument of creative wisdom) since, just as if an oracle had fallen from heaven and been dictated to my pen, so all the principal and most true chapters of that published book were immediately recognized by those who understand (as the manifest works of God usually are). And through these twenty-five years, while I have been weaving the web of the restoration of Astronomy (begun by Tycho Brahe, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was a Danish nobleman and the most accurate observational astronomer of the pre-telescopic era; Kepler served as his assistant. the most celebrated Astronomer from the Danish Nobility) these chapters have held out more than one torch for me. Finally, almost whatever astronomical books I have published since that time could be referred back to one of the principal chapters proposed in this little book, containing either its illustration or its completion; not indeed out of love for my own inventions—may such insanity be far away—but because by the facts themselves, and by obser-