Page:Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia (IA cu31924012301754).pdf/371

 Dr. Emil Wohlwill, of Hamburg, has recently expressed the suspicion that a short time before the MS. was removed from the Archives of the Holy Office to France, the Acts of the trial underwent alterations with a special purpose, in the expectation that the Archives would be robbed, and that after the return of the volume in 1846, through Mgr. Marino Marini, Prefect of the Papal Archives, these alterations were completed! Wohlwill takes all the preliminary report—the origin of which is clear, and in accordance with the rules of the Inquisition—for a forgery intended to influence "readers outside the Vatican." He also thinks that the opinion of the qualifier of the Holy Office at the head of the Acts is a later addition. The object of this no one can make out, and Dr. Wohlwill himself can give no satisfactory reason for it. As he had only Epinois's first edition of the Vatican MS. (1867), and Berti's imperfect publication in his hands, he often draws incorrect conclusions. It is hardly necessary to say that Dr. Wohlwill's bold conjectures turn out to be phantoms on an actual examination of the papers, and this will certainly be confirmed by Epinois, Berti, Pieralisi, and all who have seen them. This is not the place to refute Wohlwill's suspicions, as we have done so elsewhere. It only remains for us to give the material evidence which indisputably proves that the annotation of 26th February neither is nor can be a later falsification.

As is well known, before we had inspected these documents we had fully adopted the suspicion, expressed by Dr. Wohlwill in Germany, and Professor Gherardi in Italy, that the "document" of 26th February, 1616, was of a later origin, in order to afford a pretext, according to the ideas of the time, for bringing the inconvenient author of the "Dialogues on the Two Systems" to trial for disobedience to an order of the Sacred Congregation, though