The Ursine Rose, or the Sun

...the method of introducing a perpendicular, and I gradually taught other suitable disciples. For a direct view of the spots through a tube has absolutely no weight of certainty for the physical consideration of them, or the Question of "What" and "Why." The tube directed at the Sun indicates to the eye in a general way their number, figure, magnitude, apparent color, position, order, progression, conjunction, dilation, growth, decrease, appearance, disappearance, and delay under the Sun, and whatever things of that kind proceed from the optical and pertain to Opticians as such. Yet, you do not therefore have these projected onto paper; nor, if you did obtain them, would you therefore correctly deduce their true motion and location from them. When these are lacking, one does not dispute the Physics and Nature of the spots with sufficient solidity. Hence, I applied myself immediately to the projection onto paper and the introduction of a perpendicular, and I engaged Father Cysatus as my associate in observation, as if he were inseparable. And because I saw many delighted by these solar novelties, I continued my daily observations, and communicated them to many, especially P. Gretser and P. Tanner, partly by myself and partly through the said P. Cysatus. And because P. Iacobus Gretser made a noble man, Marcus Velser, the Duumvir Prefect of Augsburg, aware of the matter without my knowledge, it happened that in the year 1612, at the beginning of the year, he published four of my many letters along with several observations under the name of Apelles. For the phenomenon had indeed pleased the Reverend Father Theodorus Busæus, who was then caring for the Province of Upper Germany, but he was not yet of the mind to place my name at the head of a matter so sudden and still suspected by many. By these things, it happened that this new phenomenon reached some notice in the City and the World sooner than I wished, as Velser scattered it to all the provinces of Europe and sought the opinions of the Learned, which I still keep in Germany, to be useful perhaps in their own time—among which that of Protogenes is to be counted in no minor place.

The critic of Apelles knew who Apelles was before his own critique was given.

Yet some one of the Italians extorted the true name of Apelles from Velser before he wrote his own critique of his table. The reason for which he did this will shine forth in the first book. The invention pleased him, indeed, but the revealed author did not. If he had remained unknown to the Critic, Apelles would have hidden behind his table, safe. The revealed low condition (as it perhaps seemed to him) of the Writer made the Critic too bold—one whom Christian patience would teach to tolerate inflicted accusations, and Religious Obedience would forbid from repelling them. I indeed endured for many years, and wisely bore the indignities committed against the table of Apelles. Meanwhile, however, I procured through myself and my own—whether disciples or friends—many, indeed continuous and almost daily, observations of solar spots at home and abroad, to be defended in their own time for the sake of truth and my infested innocence. So that these might serve for investigating motion, I entrusted the practice of introducing a perpendicular, as a secret matter not to be communicated to others without my consent, to several, most especially to P. Io. Baptista Cysatus, my successor at Ingolstadt; P. Chrysostomus Gall, a Mathematician later in Lisbon; P. Georgius Schoenberger, who succeeded me at the University of Freiburg in the Brisgau; P. Iosephus Blancanus, a Mathematician of Parma; P. Casparus Ruess, who was sent to the West Indies; P. Gulielmus Vveli, and others. But primarily to P. Carolus Malapertius, who, moved by the novelty of the solar phenomenon, stopped at Ingolstadt to visit me while on his way to Poland in 1612, so that he might see the spots he had never seen before and learn the method of observing. This, along with the art of recording the perpendicular, or the introduction of the vertical section, I willingly shared with him under the common law of secrecy observed by others, so that he would keep it to himself and not publish this phenomenon without consulting Apelles, because Apelles himself was at times thinking of putting the final hand to his table, intending to publish his own observations and those of his friends together with worthy accolades—which have always been accepted by well-meaning souls and favorable ears by all. Having returned from Poland, the same P. Carolus came to Ingolstadt again, and, in my absence, received from P. Cysatus the method of inscribing the Ecliptic under the same conditions.

The method of introducing a perpendicular entrusted to many.