introduction into Germany of the Gregorian calendar; but the attempt was

for the time frustrated by anti-papal prejudice. The attention devoted by him to chronological subjects is evidenced by the publication about this period of several essays in which he sought to prove that the birth of Christ took place five years earlier than the commonly accepted date. Kepler's second courtship forms the subject of a highly characteristic letter addressed by him to Baron Stralendorf, in which he reviews the qualifications of eleven candidates for his hand, and explains the reasons which decided his choice in favour of a portionless orphan girl named Susanna Reutlinger. The marriage was celebrated at Linz, on the 30th of October 1613, and seems to have proved a happy and suitable one. The abundant vintage of that year drew his attention to the defective methods in use for estimating the cubical contents of vessels, and his essay on the subject (_Nova Stereometria Doliorum_, Linz, 1615) entitles him to rank among those who prepared the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus. His observations on the three comets of 1618 were published in _De Cometis_, contemporaneously with _De Harmonice Mundi_ (Augsburg, 1619), of which the first lineaments had been traced twenty years previously at Gratz. This extraordinary production is memorable as having announced the discovery of the "third law"--that of the sesquiplicate ratio between the planetary periods and distances. But the main purport of the treatise was the exposition of an elaborate system of celestial harmonies depending on the various and varying velocities of the several planets, of which the sentient soul animating the sun was the solitary auditor. The work exhibiting this fantastic emulation of extravagance with genius was dedicated to James I. of England, and the compliment was acknowledged with an invitation to that island, conveyed through Sir Henry Wotton. Notwithstanding the distracted state of his own country, he refused to abandon it, as he had previously, in 1617, declined the post of successor to G. A. Magini in the mathematical chair of Bologna. The insurmountable difficulties presented by the lunar theory forced Kepler, after an enormous amount of fruitless labour, to abandon his design of comprehending the whole scheme of the heavens in one great work to be called _Hipparchus_, and he then threw a portion of his materials into the form of a dialogue intended for the instruction of general readers. The _Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae_ (Linz and Frankfort, 1618-1621), a lucid and attractive textbook of Copernican science, was remarkable for the prominence given to "physical astronomy," as well as for the extension to the Jovian system of the laws recently discovered to regulate the motions of the planets. The first of a series of ephemerides, calculated on these principles, was published by him at Linz in 1617; and in that for 1620, dedicated to Baron Napier, he for the first time employed logarithms. This important invention was eagerly welcomed by him, and its theory formed the subject of a treatise entitled _Chilias Logarithmorum_, printed in 1624, but circulated in manuscript three years earlier, which largely contributed to bring the new method into general use in Germany. His studies were interrupted by family trouble. The restless disposition and unbridled tongue of Catherine Kepler, his mother, created for her numerous enemies in the little town of Leonberg; while her unguarded conduct exposed her to a species of calumny at that time readily circulated and believed. As early as 1615 suspicions of sorcery began to be spread against her, which she, with more spirit than prudence, met with an action for libel. The suit was purposely protracted, and at length, in 1620, the unhappy woman, then in her seventy-fourth year, was arrested on a formal charge of witchcraft. Kepler immediately hastened to Württemberg, and owing to his indefatigable exertions she was acquitted after having suffered thirteen month's imprisonment, and endured with undaunted courage the formidable ordeal of "territion," or examination under the imminent threat of torture. She survived her release only a few months, dying on the 13th of April 1622. Kepler's whole attention was now devoted to the production of the new tables. "Germany," he wrote, "does not long for peace more anxiously than I do for their publication." But financial difficulties, combined with civil and religious convulsions, long delayed the accomplishment of his desires. From the 24th of June to the 29th of August 1626, Linz was besieged, and its inhabitants reduced to the utmost straits by bands of insurgent peasants. The pursuit of science needed a more tranquil shelter; and on the raising of the blockade, Kepler obtained permission to transfer his types to Ulm, where, in September 1627, the _Rudolphine Tables_ were at length given to the world. Although by no means free from errors, their value appears from the fact that they ranked for a century as the best aid to astronomy. Appended were tables of logarithms and of refraction, together with Tycho's catalogue of 777 stars, enlarged by Kepler to 1005. Kepler's claims upon the insolvent imperial exchequer amounted by this time to 12,000 florins. The emperor Ferdinand II., too happy to transfer the burden, countenanced an arrangement by which Kepler entered the service of the duke of Friedland (Wallenstein), who assumed the full responsibility of the debt. In July 1628 Kepler accordingly arrived with his family at Sagan in Silesia, where he applied himself to the printing of his ephemerides up to the year 1636, and whence he issued, in 1629, a _Notice to the Curious in Things Celestial_, warning astronomers of approaching transits. That of Mercury was actually seen by Gassendi in Paris on the 7th of November 1631 (being the first passage of a planet across the sun ever observed); that of Venus, predicted for the 6th of December following, was invisible in western Europe. Wallenstein's promises to Kepler were but imperfectly fulfilled. In lieu of the sums due, he offered him a professorship at Rostock, which Kepler declined. An expedition to Ratisbon, undertaken for the purpose of representing his case to the diet, terminated his life. Shaken by the journey, which he had performed entirely on horseback, he was attacked with fever, and died at Ratisbon, on the 15th of November (N.S.), 1630, in the fifty-ninth year of his age. An inventory of his effects showed him to have been possessed of no inconsiderable property at the time of his death. By his first wife he had five, and by his second seven children, of whom only two, a son and a daughter, reached maturity. The character of Kepler's genius is especially difficult to estimate. His tendency towards mystical speculation formed a not less fundamental quality of his mind than its strong grasp of positive scientific truth. Without assigning to each element its due value, no sound comprehension of his modes of thought can be attained. His idea of the universe was essentially Pythagorean and Platonic. He started with the conviction that the arrangement of its parts must correspond with certain abstract conceptions of the beautiful and harmonious. His imagination, thus kindled, animated him to those severe labours of which his great discoveries were the fruit. His demonstration that the planes of all the planetary orbits pass through the centre of the sun, coupled with his clear recognition of the sun as the moving power of the system, entitles him to rank as the founder of physical astronomy. But the fantastic relations imagined by him of planetary movements and distances to musical intervals and geometrical constructions seemed to himself discoveries no less admirable than the achievements which have secured his lasting fame. Outside the boundaries of the solar system, the metaphysical side of his genius, no longer held in check by experience, fully asserted itself. The Keplerian like the Pythagorean cosmos was threefold, consisting of the centre, or sun, the surface, represented by the sphere of the fixed stars, and the intermediate space, filled with ethereal matter. It is a mistake to suppose that he regarded the stars as so many suns. He quotes indeed the opinion of Giordano Bruno to that effect, but with dissent. Among his happy conjectures may be mentioned that of the sun's axial rotation, postulated by him as the physical cause of the revolutions of the planets, and soon after confirmed by the discovery of sun-spots; the suggestion of a periodical variation in the obliquity of the ecliptic; and the explanation as a solar atmospheric effect of the radiance observed to surround the totally eclipsed sun. It is impossible to consider without surprise the colossal amount of work accomplished by Kepler under numerous disadvantages. But his iron industry counted no obstacles, and secured for him the highest triumph of genius, that of having given to mankind the best that was in him. In private character he was amiable and affectionate; his generosity in recognizing the merits of others secured him against the worst shafts of envy; and a life marked by numerous disquietudes was cheered and ennobled by sentiments of sincere piety. Kepler's extensive literary remains, purchased by the empress Catherine II. in 1724 from some Frankfort merchants, and long inaccessibly deposited in the observatory of Pulkowa, were fully brought to light, under the able editorship of Dr Ch. Frisch, in the first complete edition of his works. This important publication (_Joannis Kepleri opera omnia_, Frankfort, 1858-1871, 8 vols. 8vo) contains, besides the works already enumerated and several minor treatises, a posthumous scientific satire entitled _Joh. Keppleri Somnium_ (first printed in 1634) and a vast mass of his correspondence. A careful biography is appended, founded mainly on his private notes and other authentic documents. His correspondence with Herwart von Hohenburg, unearthed by C. Anschütz at Munich, was printed at Prague in 1886. AUTHORITIES--C. G. Reuschle, _Kepler und die Astronomie_ (Frankfort, 1871); Karl Goebel, _Über Keplers astronomische Anschauungen_ (Halle, 1871); E. F. Apelt, _Johann Keplers astronomische Weltansicht_ (Leipzig, 1849); J. L. C. Breitschwert, _Johann Keplers Leben und Wirken_ (Stuttgart, 1831); W. Förster, _Johann Kepler und die Harmonie der Sphären_ (Berlin, 1862); R. Wolf, _Geschichte der Astronomie_ (Munich, 1877); J. von Hasner, _Tycho Brahe und J. Kepler in Prag_ (1872); H. Brocard, _Essai sur la Météorologie de Kepler_ (Grenoble, 1879, 1881); Siegmund Günther, _Johannes Kepler und der tellurisch-kosmische Magnetismus_ (Wien, 1888); N. Herz, _Keplers Astrologie_ (1895); Ludwig Günther, Keplers _Traum vom Mond_ (1898; an annotated translation of the _Somnium_); A. Müller, _Johann Keppler, der Gesetzgeber der neueren Astronomie_ (1903); _Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie_, Bd. XV. (1882). (A. M. C.) KEPPEL, AUGUSTUS KEPPEL, VISCOUNT (1725-1786), British admiral, second son of the second earl of Albemarle, was born on the 25th of April 1725. He went to sea at the age of ten, and had already five years of service to his credit when he was appointed to the "Centurion," and was sent with Anson round the world in 1740. He had a narrow escape of being killed in the capture of Paita (Nov. 13, 1741), and was named acting lieutenant in 1742. In 1744 he was promoted to be commander and post captain. Until the peace of 1748 he was actively employed. In 1747 he ran his ship the "Maidstone" (50) ashore near Belleisle while chasing a French vessel, but was honourably acquitted by a court martial, and reappointed to another command. After peace had been signed he was sent into the Mediterranean to persuade the dey of Algiers to restrain the piratical operations of his subjects. The dey is said to have complained that the king of England should have sent a beardless boy to treat with him, and to have been told that if the beard was the necessary qualification for an ambassador it would have been easy to send a "Billy goat." After trying the effect of bullying without success, the dey made a treaty, and Keppel returned in 1751. During the Seven Years' War he saw constant service. He was in North America in 1755, on the coast of France in 1756, was detached on a cruise to reduce the French settlements on the west coast of Africa in 1758, and his ship the "Torbay" (74) was the first to get into action in the battle of Quiberon in 1759. In 1757 he had formed part of the court martial which had condemned Admiral Byng, and had been active among those who had endeavoured to secure a pardon for him; but neither he nor those who had acted with him could produce any serious reason why the sentence should not be carried out. When Spain joined France in 1762 he was sent as second in command with Sir George Pocock in the expedition which took Havannah. His health suffered from the fever which carried off an immense proportion of the soldiers and sailors, but the £25,000 of prize money which he received freed him from the unpleasant position of younger son of a family ruined by the extravagance of his father. He became rear-admiral in October 1762, was one of the Admiralty Board from July 1765 to November 1766, and was promoted vice-admiral on the 24th of October 1770. When the Falkland Island dispute occurred in 1770 he was to have commanded the fleet to be sent against Spain, but a settlement was reached, and he had no occasion to hoist his flag. The most important and the most debated period of his life belongs to the opening years of the war of American Independence. Keppel was by family connexion and personal preference a strong supporter of the Whig connexion, led by the Marquess of Rockingham and the Duke of Richmond. He shared in all the passions of his party, then excluded from power by the resolute will of George III. As a member of Parliament, in which he had a seat for Windsor from 1761 till 1780, and then for Surrey, he was a steady partisan, and was in constant hostility with the "King's Friends." In common with them he was prepared to believe that the king's ministers, and in particular Lord Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty, were capable of any villany. When therefore he was appointed to command the Western Squadron, the main fleet prepared against France in 1778, he went to sea predisposed to think that the First Lord would be glad to cause him to be defeated. It was a further misfortune that when Keppel hoisted his flag one of his subordinate admirals should have been Sir Hugh Palliser (1723-1796), who was a member of the Admiralty Board, a member of parliament, and in Keppel's opinion, which was generally shared, jointly responsible with his colleagues for the bad state of the navy. When, therefore, the battle which Keppel fought with the French on the 27th of July 1778 ended in a highly unsatisfactory manner, owing mainly to his own unintelligent management, but partly through the failure of Sir Hugh Palliser to obey orders, he became convinced that he had been deliberately betrayed. Though he praised Sir Hugh in his public despatch he attacked him in private, and the Whig press, with the unquestionable aid of Keppel's friends, began a campaign of calumny to which the ministerial papers answered in the same style, each side accusing the other of deliberate treason. The result was a scandalous series of scenes in parliament and of courts martial. Keppel was first tried and acquitted in 1779, and then Palliser was also tried and acquitted. Keppel was ordered to strike his flag in March 1779. Until the fall of Lord North's ministry he acted as an opposition member of parliament. When it fell in 1782 be became First Lord, and was created Viscount Keppel and Baron Elden. His career in office was not distinguished, and he broke with his old political associates by resigning as a protest against the Peace of Paris. He finally discredited himself by joining the Coalition ministry formed by North and Fox, and with its fall disappeared from public life. He died unmarried on the 2nd of October 1786. Burke, who regarded him with great affection, said that he had "something high" in his nature, and that it was "a wild stock of pride on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues." His popularity disappeared entirely in his later years. His portrait was six times painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The copy which belonged originally to Burke is now in the National Gallery. There is a full _Life of Keppel_ (1842), by his grand-nephew, the Rev. Thomas Keppel. (D. H.) KEPPEL, SIR HENRY (1809-1904), British admiral, son of the 4th earl of Albemarle and of his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Lord de Clifford, was born on the 14th of June 1809, and entered the navy from the old naval academy of Portsmouth in 1822. His family connexions secured him rapid promotion, at a time when the rise of less fortunate officers was very slow. He became lieutenant in 1829 and commander in 1833. His first command in the "Childers" brig (16) was largely passed on the coast of Spain, which was then in the midst of the convulsions of the Carlist war. Captain Keppel had already made himself known as a good seaman. He was engaged with the squadron stationed on the west coast of Africa to suppress the slave trade. In 1837 he was promoted post captain, and appointed in 1841 to the "Dido" for service in China and against the Malay pirates, a service which he repeated in 1847, when in command of H.M.S. "Maeander." The story of his two commands was told by himself in two publications, _The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. "Dido" for the Suppression of Piracy_ (1846), and in _A Visit to the Indian Archipelago in H. M. S. "Maeander"_ (1853). The substance of these books was afterwards incorporated into his autobiography, which was published in 1809 under the title _A Sailor's Life under four Sovereigns_. In 1853 he was appointed to the command of the "St Jean d'Acre" of 101 guns for service in the Crimean War. But he had no opportunity to distinguish himself at sea in that struggle. As commander of the naval brigade landed to co-operate in the siege of Sevastopol, he was more fortunate, and he had an honourable share in the latter days of the siege and reduction of the fortress. After the Crimean War he was again sent out to China, this time in command of the "Raleigh," as commodore to serve under Sir M. Seymour. The "Raleigh" was lost on an uncharted rock near Hong-Kong, but three small vessels were named to act as her tenders, and Commodore Keppel commanded in them, and with the crew of the "Raleigh," in the action with the Chinese at Fatshan Creek (June 1, 1857). He was honourably acquitted for the loss of the "Raleigh," and was named to the command of the "Alligator," which he held till his promotion to rear-admiral. For his share in the action at Fatshan Creek he was made K.C.B. The prevalence of peace gave Sir Henry Keppel no further chance of active service, but he held successive commands till his retirement from the active list in 1879, two years after he attained the rank of Admiral of the Fleet. He died at the age of 95 on the 17th of January 1904. KER, JOHN (1673-1726), Scottish spy, was born in Ayrshire on the 8th of August 1673. His true name was Crawfurd, his father being Alexander Crawfurd of Crawfurdland; but having married Anna, younger daughter of Robert Ker, of Kersland, Ayrshire, whose only son Daniel Ker was killed at the battle of Steinkirk in 1692, he assumed the name and arms of Ker in 1697, after buying the family estates from his wife's elder sister. Having become a leader among the extreme Covenanters, he made use of his influence to relieve his pecuniary embarrassments, selling his support at one time to the Jacobites, at another to the government, and whenever possible to both parties at the same time. He held a licence from the government in 1707 permitting him to associate with those whose disloyalty was known or suspected, proving that he was at that date the government's paid spy; and in his _Memoirs_ Ker asserts that he had a number of other spies and agents working under his orders in different parts of the country. He entered into correspondence with Catholic priests and Jacobite conspirators, whose schemes, so far as he could make himself cognisant of them, he betrayed to the government. But he was known to be a man of the worst character, and it is improbable that he succeeded in gaining the confidence of people of any importance. The duchess of Gordon was for a time, it is true, one of his correspondents, but in 1707 she had discovered him to be "a knave." He went to London in 1709, where he seems to have extracted considerable sums of money from politicians of both parties by promising or threatening, as the case might be, to expose Godolphin's relations with the Jacobites. In 1713, if his own story is to be believed, business of a semi-diplomatic nature took Ker to Vienna, where, although he failed in the principal object of his errand, the emperor made him a present of his portrait set in jewels. Ker also occupied his time in Vienna, he says, by gathering information which he forwarded to the electress Sophia; and in the following year on his way home he stopped at Hanover to give some advice to the future king of England as to the best way to govern the English. Although in his own opinion Ker materially assisted in placing George I. on the English throne, his services were unrewarded, owing, he would have us believe, to the incorruptibility of his character. Similar ingratitude was the recompense for his revelations of the Jacobite intentions in 1715; and as he was no more successful in making money out of the East India Company, nor in certain commercial schemes which engaged his ingenuity during the next few years, he died in a debtors' prison, on the 8th of July 1726. While in the King's Bench he sold to Edmund Curll the bookseller, a fellow-prisoner, who was serving a sentence of five months for publishing obscene books, the manuscript of (or possibly only the materials on which were based) the _Memoirs of John Ker of Kersland_, which Curll published in 1726 in three parts, the last of which appeared after Ker's death. For issuing the first part of the _Memoirs_, which purported to make disclosures damaging to the government, but which Curll in self-justification described as "vindicating the memory of Queen Anne," the publisher was sentenced to the pillory at Charing Cross; and he added to the third part of the _Memoirs_ the indictment on which he had been convicted. See the above-mentioned _Memoirs_ (London, 1726-1727), and in particular the "preface" to part i.; George Lockhart, _The Lockhart Papers_ (2 vols., London, 1817); Nathaniel Hooke, _Correspondence_, edited by W. D. Macray (Roxburghe Club, 2 vols., London, 1870), in which Ker is referred to under several pseudonyms, such as "Wicks," "Trustie," "The Cameronian Mealmonger," &c. KERAK, a town in eastern Palestine, 10 m. E. of the southern angle of the Lisan promontory of the Dead Sea, on the top of a rocky hill about 3000 ft. above sea-level. It stands on a platform forming an irregular triangle with sides about 3000 ft. in length, and separated by deep ravines from the ranges around on all sides but one. The population is estimated at 6000 Moslems and 1800 Orthodox Greek Christians. Kerak is identified with the Moabite town of Kir-Hareseth (destroyed by the Hebrew-Edomite coalition, 2 Kings iii. 25), and denounced by Isaiah under the name Kir of Moab (xv. 1), Kir-Hareseth (xvi. 7) or Kir-Heres (xvi. 11): Jeremiah also refers to it by the last name (xxxix. 31, 36). The modern name, in the form [Greek: Charax], appears in 2 Macc. xii.