Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/44

Rh 34 trial double movement, since they rcsultc.l from the ine- quality of the absolute velocities through space of the various parts of the earth's surface, produced by the motion of rotation. To this notion, which took its rise in a con- fusion of thought, he attached capital importance, and he treated with scorn Kepler's suggestion that a certain occult attraction of the moon was in some way concerned in the phenomenon. The theological censures which the book did -not fail to incur were not slow in making themselves felt. Towards the end of August the sale was prohibited ; on the 1st of October the author was cited to Home by the Inquisition. He pleaded his age, now close upon seventy years, his inﬁrm health, and the obstacles to travel caused by quarantine regulations ; but the pope was sternly indig- nant at what he held to be his ingratitude and iusubordina- tion, and no excuse was admitted. At length, on the 13th of February 1633, he arrived at the residence of Niccolini, the Tuscan ambassador to the pontiﬁcal court, and there abode in deep dejectiou for two months. From the 12th to the 30th of April he was detained in the palace of the Inquisition, where he occupied the apartments of the ﬁscal, and was treated with unexampled indulgence. On the 30th he was restored to the hospitality of Niccolini, his. warm and generous partisan. The accusation against him was that he had written in contravention of the decree of 1616, and in deﬁance of the command of the Holy Oﬁice communicated to him by Cardinal Bellarmine; and his defence consisted mainly in a disavowal of his opinions, and an appeal to his good intentions. On the 21st of June he was ﬁnally examined under menace of torture; but he continued to maintain his assertion that, after its con- demnation by the Congregation of the Index, he had never held the Copernican theory. Since the publication of the documents relating to this memorable trial, there can no longer be any doubt, not only that the threat of torture was not carried into execution, but that it was never intended that it should be. On the 22d of June, in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Galileo read his recantation, and received his sentence. He was condemned, as “ vehe- mently suspected of heresy,” to incarceration at the pleasure of the tribunal, and by way of penance was enjoined to recite once a week for three years the seven penitential psalms. This sente_nce was signed by seven cardinals, but did not receive the customary papal ratiﬁcation. The legend according to which Galileo, rising from his knees after repeating the formula of abjuration, stamped on the -ever closed in hopeless blindness. G A L I L E 0 he had three children—a son who married and left descend- ants, and two daughters who took the veil at an early age. I'otwitli.x-tanding this stain on the morality of his early life, which was in some degree compensated by the regularity of his subsequent conduct, G.1lilco’s general character was one which commanded the respect of all who approached him. His prodigious mental activity continued undimin- ished to the last, nor were his latter years the least proﬁt- able to science of his long and eventful career. In 1636 he completed his Dialog/lei delle .V:'oz-e Sc-z'e72ze=, in which he recapitulated the results of his early experiments and mature meditations on the principles of mech-a.uic.-'. This, in many respects his most valuable work, was printed by the Elzevirs at Leyden in 1638, and excited admiration equally universal and more lasting than that accorded to his astronomical treatises. His last telescopic discovery- that of the moon’s diurnal and monthly librati')ns~w-as made in 1637, only a few months before his eyes were for It was in this condition that Milton found him when he visited him at Arcetri in 1638. But the ﬁre of his genius was not even yet extinct. He continued his scientiﬁc correspondence with unbroken interest and undiminished logical acumen ; he thought out the application of the pendulum to the regulation of clock- work, which Huygens successfully realized seventeen years later; and he was engaged in dictating to his disciples, Viviani and Torricelli, his latest ideas on the theory of impact when he was seized with the slow fever which in two months brought him to the grave. On the 8th January 1612 he closed his long life of triumph and humiliation, and the coincidence of the day of his birth with that of Michelangelo’s death was paralleled by the coincidence of the year of his death with that of the birth of Isaac Newton. The direct services which Galileo rendered to astronomy are virtually summed up in his telescopic discoveries. To the theoretical perfection of the science he contributed little or nothing. He pointed out indeed that the so—called “third motion,” introduced by Copernicus to account for the constant parallelism of the earth's axis, was a superfluous complication. But he substituted the equally unnecessary hypothesis of a magnetic attraction, and failed to perceive that the phenomenon to be explained was, in relation to absolute space, not a movement, but the absence of move- ment. The circumstance, however, which most seriously detracts from his scientiﬁc reputation is his neglect of the ground, and exclaimed, “E pur si muove! ” is, as may discoveries made during his life-time by the greatest of his readily be supposed, entirely apocryphal. The earliest ascertained authority for it is the seventh edition of an IIistorical Dictiozmrg/, published at Caen in 1789. It seems probable that Galileo remained in the custody of the Inquisition from the 21st to the 24th of J unc, on which day : he was relegated to the Villa Medici on the Trinita dc’ Monti. Thence, on the 6th of July, he was permitted to depart for Siena, where he spent several months in the house of the archbishop, Ascanio Piccolomini, one of his numerous and trusty friends. It was not until December that his earnest desire of returning to Florence was realized, and there, in the Villa Martellini at Arcetri, he spent the remaining eight years of his life in the strict retirement which was the prescribed condition of his comparative freedom. Domestic aﬂlictions combined with numerous and painful inﬁrmities to embitter his old age. His sister-in-law and her whole family, who came to live with him on his return from Rome, perished shortly afterwards of the plague ; and on the Ist of April 1634 died, to the inexpressible grief of her father, his eldest and best—beloved daughter, a nun in the convent of San Matteo at Arcetri. Galileo was never married; but by a Venetian woman named Marina Gamba contemporaries. Kepler’s ﬁrst and second laws were pub- lished in 1609, and his third ten years later. By these momentous inductions the geometrical theory of the solar system was perfected, and a hitherto unimagincd symmetry was perceived to regulate the mutual relations of its mem- bers. But by Galileo they were passed over in silence. In his Dialogo chi .l[uss2'mi Sistcnzi, printed not less than thirteen years after the last of the threelaws had been given to the world, the cpicycles by which Copernicus, adhering to the ancient postulate of uniform circular motion, had endeavoured to reduce to theory the irregularities of the planetary movements were neither expressly adopted nor expressly rejected ; and, after exhausting all the apologies offered, the conclusion seems inevitable that this grave defection from the cause of progress had no other motive than the reluctance of the Florentine astronomer to accrpt discoveries which he had not originated,——this not through vulgar jealousy, of which he _was incapable, but through a certain unconscious intellectual egotism, not always un- known to the greatest minds. His name, however, is justly associated with that vast extension of the bounds of the visible universe which has re11dered modern astronomy the most sublime of sciences, and his telescopic observations