"Allow me, gentle reader, to enjoy so splendid a triumph for one little day (I mean through the five next chapters), meantime be all rumours suppressed of new rebellion, that our preparations may not perish, yielding us no delight. Hereafter if anything shall come to pass, we will go through it in its own time and season; now let us be merry, as then we will be bold and vigorous." At the time foretold, that is to say, at the end of the five merry chapters, the bad news could no longer be kept a secret. It is announced in the following bulletin:—"While thus triumphing over Mars, and preparing for him, as for one altogether vanquished, tabular prisons, and equated eccentric fetters, it is buzzed here and there that the victory is vain, and that the war is raging anew as violently as before. For the enemy, left at home a despised captive, has burst all the chains of the equations, and broken forth of the prisons of the tables. For no method of geometrically administering the theory of the 45th chapter was able to come near the accuracy of approximation of the vicarious theory of the 16th chapter, which gave me true equations derived from false principles. Skirmishers, disposed all round the circuit of the excentric, (I mean the true distances,) routed my forces of physical causes levied out of the 45th chapter, and shaking off the yoke, regained their liberty. And now there was little to prevent the fugitive enemy from effecting a junction with his rebellious supporters, and reducing me to despair, had I not suddenly sent into the field a reserve of new physical reasonings on the rout and dispersion of the veterans, and diligently followed, without allowing him the slightest respite, in the direction in which he had broken out." In plainer terms, Kepler found, after this labour was completed, that the errors in longitude he was still subject to were precisely of an opposite nature to those he had found with the circle; instead of being too quick at the apsides, the planet was now too slow there, and too much accelerated in the mean distances; and the distances obtained from direct observation were everywhere greater, except at the apsides, than those furnished by this oval theory. It was in the course of these tedious investigations that he established, still more satisfactorily than he had before done, that the inclinations of the planets' orbits are invariable, and that the lines of their nodes pass through the centre of the Sun, and not, as before his time had been supposed, through the centre of the ecliptic.