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I did, indeed, remember me of an old bronze lamp, by Vincenzo Possenti, hanging from the roof, which I now revered the third time, at intervals of twenty years; from its oscillation Galileo is said to have got the notion of the pendulum; but it is now tied back with a wire, being no longer needed for such an inspiration.
After his formal renunciation, Galileo was allowed to depart, but with the injunction that he abstain in future from heretical teaching. The remaining ten years of his life were devoted chiefly to mechanics, where his experiments fortunately opposed the Aristotelian rather than the Hebrew teachings. Galileo's death occurred in 1642, a hundred years after the death of Copernicus.
Among those who proffered their advice in this distressing emergency, we must enumerate the Cardinal Barberino, the Pope's nephew, who, though he may have felt the necessity of an interference on the part of the church, was yet desirous that it should be effected with the least injury to Galileo and to science.
But it was work of a different kind that established Galileo's popular reputation. In 1609 Galileo heard that a Dutch spectacle-maker had combined a pair of lenses so as to magnify distant objects. Working on this hint, he solved the same problem, first on paper and then in practice. So he came to make one of the first telescopes ever used in astronomy.
But Copernicus studied the sun, earth, and stars anew, and he showed that the printed books were wrong by proving that the earth moved around the sun. Galileo read the same story through the telescope that he made. "Steam had always been a very common thing.
"Galileo took for tall timber, whoopin' anthems. Up them front stairs went Augustus, screechin' shrill, like a woman; he was SURE Nate meant to murder him now. And after him his uncle went on all fours, swearin' tremendous. "Then 'twas through one bedroom after another, and each one more crowded with noisy, smashable things than that previous.
We had seen the spot, outside the city somewhere, where these people had allowed the bones of Galileo to rest in unconsecrated ground for an age because his great discovery that the world turned around was regarded as a damning heresy by the church; and we know that long after the world had accepted his theory and raised his name high in the list of its great men, they had still let him rot there.
The subject is even more amusing in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century, because Galileo and Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, and Isaac Newton took vast pains to fix the laws of acceleration for moving bodies, while Lord Bacon and William Harvey were content with showing experimentally the fact of acceleration in knowledge; but from their combined results a historian might be tempted to maintain a similar rate of movement back to 1600, subject to correction from the historians of mathematics.
The name of Galileo reminds us of it at once. Not content with investigating and reasoning in his own province, it is said, he went out of his way directly to insult the received interpretation of Scripture; theologians repelled an attack which was wanton and arrogant; and Science, affronted in her minister, has taken its full revenge upon Theology since.
"An argument against the existence of God and the immortality of the soul would be sooner tolerated than the idea that the earth moves." In reply to this fusillade, in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-two Galileo put forth his book entitled, "The Dialogue," which was intended to place the ideas of Copernicus in popular form.
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