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, called in German Brenkwitz, a celebrated astronomer and mathematician, was born at Leisnig or Leipsic in Misnia, 1495, and made professor of mathematics at Ingolstadt in 1524, where he died in 1552, aged fifty-seven. He wrote treatises upon many of the mathematical sciences, and greatly improved them, especially astronomy and astrology, which in that age were much the same thing: also geometry, geography, arithmetic. He particularly enriched astronomy with many instruments, and observations of eclipses, comets, &c. His principal work was the “Astronomicum Caesareum,” published in folio at Ingolstadt in 1540, and which contains a number of interesting observations, with the descriptions and divisions of instruments. In this work he predicts eclipses, and constructs the figures of them in piano. In the second part of the work, or the “Meteoroscopium Planum,” he gives the description of the most accurate astronomical quadrant, and its uses. To it are added observations of five different comets, viz. in the years 1531, 1532, 1533, 1538, and 1539: where he first shows that the tails of a comet are always projected in a direction from the sun.