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 Terra et stabilità del Sole, e il nuove Pittagorico Sistéma del Mondo," Kepler's "Epitome astronomiæ Copernicæ," and finally, Galileo's "Dialogo sopra i due Massimi Sistémi del Mondo." This last work had indeed been allowed to appear in the edition of Galileo's collected works, undertaken at Padua in 1744, which had received the prescribed ecclesiastical permission; but the editor, the Abbot Toaldo, had been obliged expressly to state in an introduction that the theory of the double motion can and must be regarded only as a mathematical hypothesis, to facilitate the explanation of certain natural phenomena. Besides this, the "Dialogues on the Two Principal Systems" had to be preceded by the sentence on and recantation of Galileo, as well as by an Essay "On the System of the Universe of the Ancient Hebrews," by Calmet, in which the passages of Scripture bearing on the order of the world were interpreted in the traditional Catholic fashion.

The celebrated French astronomer Lalande, as he himself relates, tried in vain when at Rome, in 1765, to get Galileo's works expunged from the Index. The Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation of the Index objected that there was a sentence of the Congregation of the Holy Office in existence which must first be cancelled, but this was not done, and all remained as before; and even in the edition of the Index of 1819, strange to say, the five works mentioned above were to be found as repudiated by the Roman curia!

It then happened in the following year, 1820, that Canon Joseph Settele, professor of optics and astronomy at the Archive-gymnasium at Rome, wrote a lesson book, "Elementi d'astronomia," in which the Copernican system, in accordance