Hand‐written notes attached to a volume from the personal library of Copernicus contain a short untitled table of unknown purpose1which gave rise to a centennial sequence of publications and comments, somewhat out of proportion to its intrinsic value. Once more let us come back to the subject, this time in the hope to settle the question. For this purpose, it will be necessary to quote a few sample lines of the table which extends from 11;30 to 15;30 (of unspecified units) in the argument. The tabular function decreases linearly by 0;23° per unit of argume