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Rh and opportunity of demonstrating his discoveries, or "celestial novelties". Cardinal Bellarmine arranged for the appointment of four commissioners to examine and report. The commissioners, chosen for their scientific attainments from among the members of the Roman College, although previously prejudiced against the new discoveries, were constrained to admit the reality of the observations, and to this extent the Church's sanction was secured. The Pope, Paul V., received Galileo favourably and other high dignitaries followed his example, while the Academy "dei Lincei" (of the lynx-eyed ones), precursor of the present Italian scientific society of the same name, elected him a member. His friends were well satisfied with the result of his visit to Rome.

It was during this visit that Galileo announced another new discovery, which entailed to all appearances more important consequences than any that had gone before. In April, 1611, he declared the existence of spots on the sun, and showed them to several leading people. At first inclined to regard them as small planets revolving round the sun, he soon found that this would not explain the appearance, and in the following year he announced positively that they were actually on the sun's surface, and rotated with the sun in rather less than a lunar month, their shape being irregular and occasionally variable. Possibly a delay of a year in the making of this discovery might have changed the course of his subsequent career, for it so happened that during 1611 a Jesuit father, Christopher Scheiner, Professsor of Mathematics at Ingolstadt, also discovered sun-spots, or claimed to have done so. The weight of evidence is unmistakably in favour of Galileo, but the question of priority is really of very small consequence if different people make absolutely independent discoveries. It is surprising at the present time to note the careful computation of