s any part of the heavens. The
accommodations for the family were numerous and splendid. Under the
observatory, in the south tower, was the museum and library, and below
this again was the laboratory in a subterraneous crypt, containing
sixteen furnaces of various kinds. Beneath this was a well forty feet
deep, from which water was distributed by syphons to every part of the
building.

Besides the principal building there were other two situated without the
rampart, one to the north, containing a workshop for the construction of
astronomical and other instruments, and the other to the south, which
was occupied as a sort of farm-house. These buildings cost the King of
Denmark 100,000 rix-dollars (L20,000), and Tycho is said to have
expended upon them a similar sum.

As the two towers could not accommodate the instruments which Tycho
required for his observations, he found it necessary to erect, on the
hill about sixty paces to the south of Uraniburg, a subterranean
observatory, in which he might place his larger instruments, which
required to be firmly fixed, and to be protected from the wind and the
weather. This observatory, which he called Stiern-berg, or the mountain,
of the stars, consisted of several crypts, separated by solid walls,
and to these there was a subterranean passage from the laboratory in
Uraniburg. The various buildings which Tycho erected were built in a
regular style of architecture, and were highly ornamented, not only with
external decorations, but with the statues and pictures of the most
distinguished astronomers, from Hipparchus and Ptolemy down to
Copernicus, and with inscriptions and poems in honour of astronomers.

While these buildings were erecting, and after their completion, Tycho
was busily occupied in preparing instruments for observation. These were
of the most splendid description, and the reader will form some notion
of their grandeur and their expense from the following list:--

_In the south and greater Observatory._

1. A semicircle of solid iron, covered with brass, four cubits
radius.

2. A sextant of the same materials and size.

3. A quadrant of one and a half cubits radius, and an azimuth
circle of three cubits.

4. Ptolemy's parallactic rules, covered with brass, four cubits in
the side.

5. The sextant already described in page 134.

6. Another quadrant, like No. 3.

7. Zodiacal armillaries of melted brass,