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Socrates met them all; Rousseau heard the cry of "fad"; Heyne, Pestalozzi, Campe, Knuth and Froebel met the carpist and answered him reason for reason, just as Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo told the reason the earth revolved.
Galileo set to work timing and measuring these oscillations, and he found that they were always done in exact measure and in perfect rhythm. This led, some years later, to perfecting an astronomical clock for measuring movements of the stars. And from this was originated the pendulum-clock, where before we had depended on sundials.
We must call to mind that, although the beginnings of modern science were laid by such men as Copernicus, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Torricelli, before the middle of the seventeenth century, unbroken activity and progress date from the foundations of the Academy of Sciences of Paris and the Royal Society of London at that time.
The situation of master of the palace was, fortunately for Galileo's designs, filled by Nicolo Riccardi, a friend and pupil of his own. This officer was a sort of censor of new publications, and when he was applied to on the subject of printing his work, Galileo soon found that attempts had previously been made to thwart his views.
He made the dullest subjects interesting; he clothed the dry bones of metaphysics with flesh and blood; he invested the most abstruse speculations with life and charm; he filled the minds of old men with envy, and of young men with admiration; he thrilled admirers with his wit, sarcasm, and ridicule, a sort of Galileo, mocking yet amusing, with a superlative contempt of dulness and pretension.
The answers lie deep within the dark recesses of the human collective soul, and no man may understand what takes place there. I am content to know that I shall have succeeded despite it all. Some day a future age may remember me, like Copernicus, like Galileo, as one who fought upstream successfully." The diary ended there.
It was therefore not unnatural for Galileo to think that the time had arrived when, with the use of due circumspection, he might continue his studies and his writings, without fear of incurring the displeasure of the Church. Indeed, in 1624, one of Galileo's friends writing from Rome, urges Galileo to visit the city again, and added that
Linnæus did for botany what Galileo had done for astronomy. John Ray was only a John the Baptist. Carl von Linne, or Carolus Linnæus as he preferred to be called, was born in an obscure village in the Province of Smaland, Sweden. His father was a clergyman, passing rich on forty pounds a year. His mother was only eighteen years old when she bore him, and his father had just turned twenty-one.
The fine Albert Duerer an altarpiece in wood the Moro portraits, the Bronzino Descent from the Cross all veritable gems, lastly the portrait of Cardinal Granvelle by Titian. This is a noble work; there are also two canvases attributed to Velasquez, "Galileo," and a "Mathematician."
The favourable reception which had been accorded to him by Pope Urban VIII. seems to have led Galileo to expect that there might be some corresponding change in the attitude of the Papal authorities on the great question of the stability of the earth. He accordingly proceeded with the preparation of the chief work of his life, "The Dialogue of the two Systems."
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