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At a time when the world was imperilled by the treatment accorded to Galileo for believing in the motion of the earth; and though 69 years of age he was cast, by the tools of Vatican, into a dungeon, where he lost his sight and ultimately his life; and Copernicus was facing the same fate, for accomplishing a noble astronomical discovery; and Martin Luther was persecuted by the Roman Catholic church, for trying to bring the people nearer to God.

Galileo, who invented the telescope, turned it on to the sky in 1610, when our King Charles I. was on the throne, and he saw these curious bodies which at first he could not believe to be moons. The four which he saw vary in size from two thousand one hundred miles in diameter to nearly three thousand six hundred.

He continued to observe her night after night, during the whole time that she could be seen in the course of her revolution round the sun, and he found that she exhibited the very same phases which resulted from her motion round that luminary. Galileo had long contemplated a visit to the metropolis of Italy, and he accordingly carried his intentions into effect in the early part of the year 1611.

As the slidewalk carried the three cadets between the buildings that surrounded the grassy quadrangle of the Academy, Tom looked up at the Tower of Galileo dominating the entire area. "You know," he began haltingly, "every time I go near this place I get a lump in my throat!" "Yeah," breathed Astro, "me too." Roger made no comment.

Galileo was not less distinguished for his hospitality and benevolence; he was liberal to the poor, and generous in the aid which he administered to men of genius and talent, who often found a comfortable asylum under his roof. In his domestic economy he was frugal without being parsimonious.

If the love of Truth, alone, was the guiding impulse of Galileo, he might have secretly explained his theory to one of the wiseacres, and this wiseacre could have casually demonstrated it, so all the rest could have said, "That is what we always knew and taught." Instead of this, Galileo compelled the entire faculty to back water and dine on fricasseed crow.

He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about 1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the maintenance and defence of the Holy Church, and the rights and liberties of the same."

The triumph of topsy-turveydom was when Galileo, the Oscar Wilde of Astronomy, declared that the earth went round the sun a sheer piece of inversion. Darwin, the Barry Pain of Biology, asserted that man rose from the brutes, and that, instead of creatures being adapted to conditions, conditions adapted creatures.

Galileo exhibits all the traits characteristic of modern thinking: the reference from words to things, from memory to perception and thought, from authority to self-ascertained principles, from chance opinion, arbitrary opinion, and the traditional doctrines of the schools, to "knowledge," that is, to one's own, well grounded, indisputable insight, from the study of human affairs to the study of nature.

I cannot quit La Roche Gageac without a word on one of its most illustrious natives, Jean Tarde, born there in 1561 the friend of Galileo, and who, the first in France, five years after the great Florentine had begun to search the skies with his telescope, invented one year previously, erected his tube here at one of the openings of this eagle's nest, and during ten consecutive years pursued his astronomic studies.