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At the same time Dirck Maertensz, at Louvain, was also at work for Erasmus, who had, on passing through the town, entrusted him with a collection of easy Latin texts; also M. Schürer at Strassburg, who prepared the Parabolae sive similia for him. For Froben, too, Erasmus was engaged on a Seneca, which appeared in 1515, together with a work on Latin construction.
Jacobus of Breda, who began printing at Deventer in 1486, produced Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's De Senectute and De Officiis, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae and De disciplina scholarium, Aesop, a poem by Baptista Mantuanus, the 'Christian Virgil', Alan of Lille's Parabolae, Alexander, two grammatical treatises by Synthius and the Epistola mythologica of Bartholomew of Cologne.
His object was to find out if any of them really travelled in elongated ellipses, practically undistinguishable, in the visible part of their paths, from parabolae, in which case they would be seen more than once. He found two old comets whose orbits, in shape and position, resembled the orbit of a comet observed by himself in 1682. Apian observed one in 1531; Kepler the other in 1607.
He proved that if a body be projected with any velocity in free space, subject only to a central force, varying inversely as the square of the distance, the body must revolve in a curve which may be any one of the sections of a cone a circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola; and he found that those comets of which he had observations move in parabolae round the Sun, and are thus subject to the universal law.
Here we will anticipate the course of Erasmus's life for a moment, to enumerate the principal works of this sort. Some years later the Adagia increased from hundreds to thousands, through which not only Latin, but also Greek, wisdom spoke. In 1514 he published in the same manner a collection of similitudes, Parabolae.
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