moreover, deficient in ability of statement; and his position was achieved chiefly by hard work, a good knowledge of law and several lucky friendships. Through the influence of Lord Thurlow, Kenyon in 1780 entered the House of Commons as member for Hindon, and in 1782 he was, through the same friendship, appointed attorney-general in Lord Buckingham’s administration, an office which he continued to hold under Pitt. In 1784 he received the mastership of the rolls, and was created a baronet. In 1788 he was appointed lord chief justice as successor to Lord Mansfield, and the same year was raised to the peerage as Baron Kenyon of Gredington. As he had made many enemies, his elevation was by no means popular with the bar; but on the bench, in spite of his capricious and choleric temper, he proved himself not only an able lawyer, but a judge of rare and inflexible impartiality. He died at Bath, on the 4th of April 1802. Kenyon was succeeded as 2nd baron by his son George (1776–1855), whose great-grandson, Lloyd (b. 1864), became the 4th baron in 1869.
See Life by Hon. G. T. Kenyon, 1873.
KEOKUK, a city of Lee county, Iowa, U.S.A., on the Mississippi
river, at the mouth of the Des Moines, in the S.E. corner of
the state, about 200 m. above St Louis. Pop. (1900), 14,641;
(1905), 14,604, including 1534 foreign-born; (1910), 14,008.
It is served by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Chicago,
Rock Island & Pacific, the Wabash, and the Toledo, Peoria
& Western railways. There is a bridge (about 2200 ft. long)
across the Mississippi, and another (about 1200 ft. long) across
the Des Moines. The city has a public library and St Joseph
and Graham hospitals, and is the seat of the Keokuk Medical
College (1849). There is a national cemetery here. Much of the
city is built on bluffs along the Mississippi. Keokuk is at the
foot of the Des Moines Rapids, round which the Federal Government
has constructed a navigable canal (opened 1877) about 9 m.
long, with a draft at extreme low water of 5 ft.; at the foot a
great dam, 112 m. long and 38 ft. high, has been constructed.
Keokuk has various manufactures; its factory product in 1905
was valued at $4,225,915, 38.6% more than in 1900. The city
was named after Keokuk, a chief of the Sauk and Foxes (1780–1848),
whose name meant “the watchful” or “he who moves
alertly.” In spite of Black Hawk’s war policy in 1832 Keokuk
was passive and neutral, and with a portion of his nation remained
peaceful while Black Hawk and his warriors fought. His
grave, surmounted by a monument, is in Rand Park. The first
house on the site of the city was built about 1820, but further
settlement did not begin until 1836. Keokuk was laid out as a
town in 1837, was chartered as a city in 1848, and in 1907 was one
of five cities of the state governed by a special charter.
KEONJHAR, a tributary state of India, within the Orissa
division of Bengal; area, 3096 sq. m.; pop. (1901), 285,758;
estimated revenue, £20,000. The state is an offshoot from
Mayurbhanj. Part of it consists of rugged hills, rising to more
than 3000 ft. above sea-level. The residence of the raja is at
Keonjhar (pop. 4532).
KEONTHAL, a petty hill state in the Punjab, India, with an
area of 116 sq. m.; pop. (1901), 22,499; estimated revenue,
£4400. The chief, a Rajput, received the title of raja in 1857.
After the Gurkha War in 1815, a portion of Keonthal, which had
been occupied by the Gurkhas, was sold to the maharaja of
Patiala, the remainder being restored to its hereditary chief.
In 1823 the district of Punar was added to the Keonthal state.
The raja exercises rights of lordship over the petty states of
Kothi, Theog, Madhan and Ratesh.
KEPLER, JOHANN (1571–1630), German astronomer, was
born on the 27th of December 1571, at Weil, in the duchy of
Württemberg, of which town his grandfather was burgomaster.
He was the eldest child of an ill-assorted union. His father,
Henry Kepler, was a reckless soldier of fortune; his mother,
Catherine Guldenmann, the daughter of the burgomaster of
Eltingen, was undisciplined and ill-educated. Her husband
found campaigning in Flanders under Alva a welcome relief from
domestic life; and, after having lost all he possessed by a forfeited
security and tried without success the trade of tavern-keeping in
the village of Elmendingen, he finally, in 1589, deserted his family.
The misfortune and misconduct of his parents were not the only
troubles of Kepler’s childhood. He recovered from small-pox
in his fourth year with crippled hands and eyesight permanently
impaired; and a constitution enfeebled by premature birth had
to withstand successive shocks of severe illness. His schooling
began at Leonberg in 1577—the year, as he himself tells us, of
a great comet; but domestic bankruptcy occasioned his transference
to field-work, in which he was exclusively employed for
several years. Bodily infirmity, combined with mental aptitude,
were eventually considered to indicate à theological vocation;
he was, in 1584, placed at the seminary of Adelberg, and thence
removed, two years later, to that of Maulbronn. A brilliant
examination for the degree of bachelor procured him, in 1588,
admittance on the foundation to the university of Tübingen,
where he laid up a copious store of classical erudition, and imbibed
Copernican principles from the private instructions of his teacher
and life-long friend, Michael Maestlin. As yet, however, he
had little knowledge of, and less inclination for, astronomy;
and it was with extreme reluctance that he turned aside from the
more promising career of the ministry to accept, early in 1594,
the vacant chair of that science at Gratz, placed at the disposal
of the Tübingen professors by the Lutheran states of Styria.
The best recognized function of German astronomers in that day was the construction of prophesying almanacs, greedily bought by a credulous public. Kepler thus found that the first duties required of him were of an astrological nature, and set himself with characteristic alacrity to master the rules of the art as laid down by Ptolemy and Cardan. He, moreover, sought in the events of his own life a verification of the theory of planetary influences; and it is to this practice that we owe the summary record of each year’s occurrences which, continued almost to his death, affords for his biography a slight but sure foundation. But his thoughts were already working in a higher sphere. He early attained to the settled conviction that for the actual disposition of the solar system some abstract intelligible reason must exist, and this, after much meditation, he believed himself to have found in an imaginary relation between the “five regular solids” and the number and distances of the planets. He notes with exultation the 9th of July 1595, as the date of the pseudo-discovery, the publication of which in Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum seu Mysterium Cosmographicum (Tübingen, 1596) procured him much fame, and a friendly correspondence with the two most eminent astronomers of the time, Tycho Brahe and Galileo.
Soon after his arrival at Gratz, Kepler contracted an engagement with Barbara von Mühleck, a wealthy Styrian heiress, who, at the age of twenty-three, had already survived one husband and been divorced from another. Before her relatives could be brought to countenance his pretensions, Kepler was obliged to undertake a journey to Württemberg to obtain documentary evidence of the somewhat obscure nobility of his family, and it was thus not until the 27th of April 1597 that the marriage was celebrated. In the following year the archduke Ferdinand, on assuming the government of his hereditary dominions, issued an edict of banishment against Protestant preachers and professors. Kepler immediately fled to the Hungarian frontier, but, by the favour of the Jesuits, was recalled and reinstated in his post. The gymnasium, however, was deserted; the nobles of Styria began to murmur at subsidizing a teacher without pupils; and he found it prudent to look elsewhere for employment. His refusal to subscribe unconditionally to the rigid formula of belief adopted by the theologians of Tübingen permanently closed against him the gates of his alma mater. His embarrassment was relieved however by an offer from Tycho Brahe of the position of assistant in his observatory near Prague, which, after a preliminary visit of four months, he accepted. The arrangement was made just in time; for in August 1600 he received definitive notice to leave Gratz, and, having leased his wife’s property, he departed with his family for Prague.
By Tycho’s unexpected death (Oct. 24, 1601) a brilliant career seemed to be thrown open to Kepler. The emperor Rudolph II.
