Dialexis de novae et prius incognitae stellae inusitatae magnitudinis & splendidissimi luminis apparitione, & de eiusdem stellae vero loco constituendo ...

Handwritten marginalia at the top: Note well. This same Johannes Crato de Crafftheim also wrote letters to Joseph Scaliger, which are contained at the beginning of the book on the Subtlety of Scaliger, by Imho.

A woodcut depicts a headpiece featuring ornate floral and foliate scrollwork.

A woodcut initial N.

JOHANNES CRATO DE CRAFFTHEIM, Physician-in-Chief to the Emperor, to Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hayck, greetings.

You know that which M. Cicero calls pseudochronion a false judgment of time: "Do not judge a case before you have heard the speech of both sides." For my part, I can affirm that I have not had, nor do I have, enough leisure from my medical duties to read those writings which have been published regarding that star—as they call it—the new one, or to examine yours as thoroughly as those who place faith in craftsmen are accustomed to interposing their own judgment. But as concerns that teratode monstrous/portentous star, or asteroeide star-like comet, everything I had thought—at the time it appeared—regarding the most accurate observations of Mr. Paulus Heincelius, a councilor of Augsburg, which his brother Mr. Johannes Baptista Heincelius had sent to me, has slipped my mind. And those very things I received from Mr. Heincelius, I can no longer find among my many papers, to which I add new ones daily. I believed, and I am still of the opinion, that when it began and vanished, it was an exhalation from a fatty, thick, hot, and dry material that could be ignited and inflamed; and, as it were, the remnants of that comet which burned out in the year 1556, and having been kindled in Libra, ascended toward the pole of the Zodiac and arrived at the constellation of Cassiopeia.