Johannes Kepler on Snowflakes or what to give someone who has everything

In 1611 Kepler was Imperial Mathematician at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf I in Prague. In theory his salary was generous, but in fact the cash strapped Imperial exchequer often failed to pay. So when considering what he could give as a New Year’s gift to his friend and patron, Wacker von Wackfels he realised he had nothing to offer.

His playful solution was that he would give him a book about nothing. But what sort of no-thing? A grain of sand, a tiny mite, a drop of water or spark of fire, the wind perhaps. None of these seemed to fit.

He was crossing the Charles bridge in Prague pondering this problem, when suddenly he struck was by the shape of the snowflakes falling on his coat, ‘all six cornered with tufted radii.’ This was his solution; he would present his friend with a treatise on the evanescent snowflake (there is a pun here on ‘nichts’ the German for ‘nothing’ and ‘nix’ the Latin for ‘snowflake.’).

Stelluae nivales (Little snowy stars)

Across twenty-four pages of closely argued text and a few simple diagrams, Kepler attempts to find an answer to the question of why snowflakes always fall as small six cornered star shapes. There must be a cause he suggested, else why aren’t some four, five or even seven sided?

Perhaps, he considers, the hexagonal shape allows for the most efficient way of packing together the flakes of snow. He compares the shape of the snowflakes to the hexagonal cells of bee hives and to the packed arrangement of pomegranate seeds in the fruit. But then why are they flat not spherical?

Surviving copies of Kepler’s little treatise are rare, there is only one other in a public library in the UK (in the Science Museum Library). The St Edmund Hall copy is in a sämmelband or bound collection of seven 17th century scientific and mathematical treatises. All are very rare, five of the seven are the only copies of those works in Oxford.

Our copy of the Strena was itself a gift. We owe the volume to the generosity of an Aularian named Timothy Godwyn (1670-1729, created MA 1697). Godwyn gave the Library the volume of treatises in October 1697 as well as two volumes of the Historiae Plantarum by the naturalist John Ray in January 1668. In both works there is a handwritten dedication by Godwyn presenting the book to the Hall.

Godwyn came from a non-conformist background, and studied first in 1686 at an academy run by Samuel Craddock, a former Fellow of Emmanuel College Cambridge who had been ejected from the Church of England after the Restoration. One of his classmates, the historian Edmund Calamy, recalled spending winter evenings with him reading Greek authors.

At this point Godwyn intended to follow a medical career. He lodged with a doctor named Edward Hulse in London and then went onto study in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Oxford and Cambridge Universities were at this point only available to members of the Anglican church.

At some point Godwyn instead decided to pursue a clerical career in the Church of England. He returned to England and was created an MA in Oxford in 1697, claiming to already have a degree from Utrecht. He was not uniformly popular with other members of St Edmund Hall. Thomas Hearne in his diary entry for June 27 1707 calls him, “a great Pretender, & a bold, confident man, & will do anything for Preferment which is all he aims at. When he was of Edm. Hall he was stingy, niggardly Fellow, & I do not remember he did any good there…” and cast doubt on the authenticity of his Utrecht credentials. Again on January 28 1709 Hearne calls him “that unworthy, illiterate Fellow.”

Hearne, did at least concede that John Mill, the Principal of St Edmund Hall from 1685-1707, had a good opinion of Godwyn. Whether or not Hearne was correct in his judgement about Godwyn’s ambition, he certainly went on to great success. He secured the patronage of Charles Talbot, the Duke of Shrewsbury, who gave him the living of Heythrop in Oxfordshire, where the Duke had his country house. Godwyn became Archdeacon of Oxford in 1707 (the occasion for Hearne’s broadside) and then went with Talbot to Ireland in 1713. He was made Bishop of Kilmore in 1715 eventually rising to become Archbishop of Cashel in 1727. He was a moderate in Irish politics and popular with all sides. William King, the Archbishop of Dublin, called him a ‘grave, sober, good man.’

Time though has definitely proved Hearne wrong in his assessment that Godwyn did no good to the College. His first gift of the book of scientific treatises was relatively cheap, a note at the front gives its price as two shillings and six pence, maybe twenty pounds in today’s money. It may have been something he had used in his earlier studies as it bears his name and the rather romantic statement ‘ars longa, vita brevis.’ Perhaps he felt that he no longer needed it with his change in focus or he may have wanted to donate something that reflected the intellectual interests of students at the time (notably the Descartes and Hooke works mentioned earlier were given to the Library in the same period). Whatever his reasons, Godwyn’s gift is now an incredibly important record of the scientific enquiry of the seventeenth century and the volume is also a part of the larger story of the Old Library and the Aularians and others who contributed to it.