93. The publication of the _De Revolutionibus_ appears to have been received much more quietly than might have been expected from the startling nature of its contents. The book, in fact, was so written as to be unintelligible except to mathematicians of considerable knowledge and ability, and could not have been read at all generally. Moreover the preface, inserted by Osiander but generally supposed to be by the author himself, must have done a good deal to disarm the hostile criticism due to prejudice and custom, by representing the fundamental principles of Coppernicus as mere geometrical abstractions, convenient for calculating the celestial motions. Although, as we have seen (chapter IV., § 73), the contradiction between the opinions of Coppernicus and the common interpretation of various passages in the Bible was promptly noticed by Luther, Melanchthon, and others, no objection was raised either by the Pope to whom the book was dedicated, or by his immediate successors. The enthusiastic advocacy of the Coppernican views by Rheticus has already been referred to. The only other astronomer of note who at once accepted the new views was his friend and colleague _Erasmus Reinhold_ (born at Saalfeld in 1511), who occupied the chief chair of mathematics and astronomy at Wittenberg from 1536 to 1553, and it thus happened, curiously enough, that the doctrines so emphatically condemned by two of the great Protestant leaders were championed principally in what was generally regarded as the very centre of Protestant thought. 94. Rheticus, after the publication of the _Narratio Prima_ and of an Ephemeris or Almanack based on Coppernican principles (1550), occupied himself principally with the calculation of a very extensive set of mathematical tables, which he only succeeded in finishing just before his death in 1576.