Famous Men of Science

With all this work in mind, he resigned the professorship at Padua, and removed to Florence, the Grand Duke Cosmo II. giving him a yearly salary of about one thousand dollars, and the title of Philosopher to His Highness.

His first thought, as ever, was for his family. He asked an advance of two years' salary, and paid the dowry debts of his sisters' grasping husbands.

In 1611, his expenses paid by the Grand Duke, he went to Rome to show his "celestial novelties," as they were called, to the pope and the cardinals. He was received with great attention, and all seemed delighted to look upon the wonders of the heavens, provided always that nothing could be proved against the supposed assertion of the Bible that the earth did not move!

Galileo soon published his "Discourse on Floating Bodies," which aroused violent opposition; "Spots observed on the Body of the Sun," and the "Discourse on the Tides."

Four years later, he was again in Rome to plead for the Copernican system, and to defend his own conduct in advocating a thing in opposition to the Catholic church. He said: "I am inclined to think that the authority of Holy Scripture is intended to convince men of those truths which are necessary for their salvation, and which, being far above man's understanding, cannot be made credible by any learning, or any other means than revelation by the Holy Spirit. But that the same God, who has endowed us with senses, reason, and understanding, does not permit us to use them, and desires to acquaint us in any other way with such knowledge as we are in a position to acquire for ourselves by means of those faculties, that, it seems to me, I am not bound to believe, especially concerning those sciences about which the Holy Scriptures contain only small fragments and varying conclusions; and this is precisely the case with astronomy, of which there is so little that the planets are not even all enumerated."

However, in spite of Galileo's logic, the church decreed that all books which stated the Copernican system as true should be prohibited; as a mathematical hypothesis, it might be speculated upon. This was a great disappointment to Galileo, who loved and revered the Roman Catholic faith. He went home to the Villa Segni, at Bellosguardo, near Florence, and for seven years led a studious and secluded life.

His greatest comfort, during these quiet years, was the devotion of his daughter, Polissena, who had entered a convent as Sister Maria Celeste. While in Padua, Galileo had three children by Marina Gamba, a Venetian woman of inferior station. She afterwards married a man of her own class, and Galileo took his children to his own home; a condition of things possible with the low moral standard of the time. The two daughters were placed in a convent, while the son, Vincenzo, was educated for the profession of medicine, but he seems to have been a disappointment and a source of discomfort.

Maria Celeste, in the convent of St. Matthew, loving and tender, and helpful to all around her, wrote constantly to the man whom she idolized. "I put by carefully," she says, "the letters you write me daily, and when not engaged with my duties, I read them over and over again. This is the greatest pleasure I have, and you may think how glad I am to read the letters you receive from persons who, besides being excellent in themselves, have you in esteem."

Again she writes, "I leave you to imagine how pleased I am to read the letters you constantly send me. Only to see how your love for me prompts you to let me know fully what favors you receive from these gentlemen is enough to fill me with joy. Nevertheless I feel it a little hard to hear that you intend leaving home so soon, because I shall have to do without you, and for a long time too, if I am not mistaken. And your lordship may believe that I am speaking the truth when I say that except you there is not a creature who gives me any comfort. But I will not grieve at your departure because of this, for that would be to complain when you had cause for rejoicing. Therefore I too will rejoice, and continue to pray God to give you grace and health to make a prosperous journey, so that you may return satisfied, and live long and happily, all which, I trust, will come to pass by God's help.

"I send two baked pears for these days of vigil. But as the greatest treat of all, I send you a rose, which ought to please you extremely, seeing what a rarity it is at this season. And with the rose, you must accept its thorns, which represent the bitter passion of our Lord, while the green leaves represent the hope we may entertain that through the same Sacred Passion we, having passed through the darkness of this short winter of our mortal life, may attain to the brightness and felicity of an eternal spring in heaven."

"Only in one respect does cloister life weigh heavily on me; that is, that it prevents my attending on you personally, which would be my desire, were it permitted. My thoughts are always with you."

And so the seven years of study went by, with the sweet love of Maria Celeste to brighten them. There are none so great that they can live without affection.

At the end of the seven years, Urban VIII. came to the pontifical throne, and Galileo and other scientists rejoiced, for he had seemed liberal in thought and generous in heart. When he was cardinal, he had sent a letter to Galileo, saying, "The esteem which I always entertain for yourself and your great merits has given occasion to the enclosed verses. If not worthy of you, they will serve at any rate as a proof of my affection, while I purpose to add lustre to my poetry by your renowned name. Without wasting words, then, in further apologies, which I leave to the confidence which I place in you, I beg you to receive with favor this insignificant proof of my great affection."

At Easter, 1624, Galileo, now sixty years old, resolved to proceed to Rome, to welcome the new pope, and urge his approval of the Copernican theory. Frail in health, he was carried most of the way in a litter. During a visit of six weeks, he had six long audiences with Urban VIII.; but, though he was affably received, the pope was in no wise convinced, but rather tried to convince Galileo that he was in error.

Yet so kind was he that Galileo went back to Florence with the hope and belief that he could bring out his great work, "Dialogues on the Two Principal Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and Copernican," without opposition from the church. In this book, Galileo gave the results of scientific research and discovery in the half century preceding, using such clear yet brilliant style in writing as to make the work attractive even to the unlearned.

It was ready for publication in March, 1630, but to be sure that the pope did not object, Galileo was urged to go in person to Rome. He went and presented the matter to Urban, who gave his consent provided that the title should show that the Copernican system was treated as a hypothesis merely, and that he, the pope, should write the closing argument.

Rather than forego the publication of that upon which he had worked for years, Galileo consented, and returned to Florence. A license to publish was then obtained from the Inquisitor-General, and the Vicar-General of Florence, after great delay. A second and a third time the papal authorities wished to look over the manuscript. Two years went slowly by.

Other anxieties came to the man of sixty-eight, besides the long delay. The impecunious Michelangelo sent his wife, seven children, and a German nurse, to the home of Galileo, to be taken care of. The eldest nephew was sent to Rome to study music. He was found to be obstinate, impudent, and dissolute, "wicked ways" which his weak and indulgent father said "he did not learn from me, or any one else belonging to him. It must have been the fault of his wet nurse!"

Galileo's son Vincenzo had married and brought his wife home to live. Strange fortune for this man of genius! Strange that he must have helpless relatives, and constant pecuniary troubles. Most great lives are as pathetic as they are great.

As ever, the one gleam of light was the daily letter from Maria Celeste, in which she expressed a tenderness beyond what any daughter ever had for a father. "But I do not know how to express myself, except by saying that I love you better than myself. For, after God, I belong to you; and your kindnesses are so numberless that I feel I could put my life in peril, were it to save you from any trouble, excepting only that I would not offend His Divine Majesty."

Finally Galileo moved to Arcetri, over against the convent, to be near the one who alone satisfied his heart.

In January, 1632, the "Dialogues" appeared. Copies were sent to his friends and disciples throughout Italy. The whole country applauded, and at last Galileo seemed to have won the homage he had so long deserved.

But a storm was gathering. Enemies were at work prejudicing the mind of Urban VIII., making him feel that Galileo had wrought evil to the church. At once an order came from the Inquisition to secure every copy in the booksellers' shops throughout Italy, and to forward all copies to Rome.

In October of the same year of publication, Galileo was summoned to appear at Rome, to answer to that terror of past centuries, the charge of heresy. His friends urged that he was old and feeble, and that he would die on the journey, but Urban's commands were peremptory.

Galileo was deeply depressed by the summons, and wrote a friend: "This vexes me so much that it makes me curse the time devoted to these studies, in which I strove and hoped to deviate somewhat from the beaten track generally pursued by learned men. I not only repent having given the world a portion of my writings, but feel inclined to suppress those still in hand, and to give them to the flames, and thus satisfy the longing desire of my enemies, to whom my ideas are so inconvenient."

On January 20, 1633, the decrepit old man set out in a litter for Rome, arriving on February 13. On April 12, he was brought before the Inquisition, and briefly examined and then remanded to prison, though treated with great leniency. The anxiety and deprivation from outdoor exercise brought on illness, and he was confined to his bed till led a second time before the Inquisition, April 30.

Weak, aged, in fear of torture, he made the melancholy confession that his "error had been one of vainglorious ambition, and pure ignorance and inadvertence." Pure ignorance! from the man who had studied for fifty years all that the world knew of science! But he recalled how men had died at the stake for offending the church. The world is not full of men and women who can suffer death for their convictions, however much we may admire such courage. On May 10, he was summoned a third time before the Inquisition, and told that he had eight days in which to write his defence. In touching language he stated how the book had been examined and re examined by the authorities, so that there might be nothing heterodox in it; and then he urged them to consider his age and feeble health.

A fourth time he came before the Holy Congregation, June 21, and was asked whether he held that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and that the earth is not the centre, and that it moves. He replied, "I do not hold, and have not held this opinion of Copernicus since the command was intimated to me that I must abandon it; for the rest, I am here in your hands, – do with me what you please."

And then June 22, in the forenoon, in the large hall of the Dominican Convent of St. Maria sopra la Minerva, in the presence of cardinals and prelates, he heard his sentence.

"The proposition that the sun is the centre of the world and does not move from its place is absurd, and false philosophically, and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to the Holy Scripture.

"The proposition that the earth is not the centre of the world and immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically; and theologically considered, at least, erroneous in faith… Invoking, therefore, the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His most glorious mother and ever Virgin Mary … we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, that you, the said Galileo, by reason of the matters adduced in process, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself, in the judgment of this Holy Office, vehemently suspected of heresy, – namely, of having believed and held the doctrine, which is false and contrary to the sacred and divine Scriptures, – that the sun is the centre of the world and does not move from east to west, and that the earth moves and is not the centre of the world… We condemn you to the formal prison of this Holy Office during our pleasure, and, by way of salutary penance, we enjoin that for three years to come you repeat once a week the seven Penitential Psalms."

Galileo was also required to "abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies." And then the white-haired man of seventy, humbly kneeling before the whole assembly, made the pitiful abjuration of his belief. "I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and, generally, all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church."

Pitiful spectacle of intolerance! If we of this nineteenth century have learned to tolerate and treat with respect the beliefs of others though widely divergent from our own, perhaps this wretched drama was not acted in vain.

It has been said that Galileo exclaimed as he rose from his feet, "E pur si muove," "It moves, for all that," but this would have been well nigh an impossibility, in the midst of men who would instantly have taken him to a dungeon, and the story is no longer believed.

On July 9, poor Galileo was allowed to leave Rome for Siena, where he stayed five months in the house of the archbishop, and then became a prisoner in his own house at Arcetri, with strict injunctions that he was "not to entertain friends, nor to allow the assemblage of many at a time."

He wrote sadly to Maria Celeste, "My name is erased from the book of the living." Tender words came back, saying that it seemed "a thousand years" since she had seen him, and that she would recite the seven penitential psalms for him, "to save you the trouble of remembering it."

In less than a year, sweet Maria Celeste had said the last psalms for him. She died April 1, 1634, at thirty-three years of age, leaving Galileo heart-broken; "a woman," he said, "of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me."

He went to work on another book, but he said, pathetically, "I hear her constantly calling me!" Beautiful spirit, that will forever shed a halo around the name of Galileo Galilei!

In the summer of 1636, he completed his "Dialogues on Motion," and sent it to Leyden for publication. The next year he made his last discovery, known as the moon's librations.

The house at Arcetri had become dark and lonely. The wife of Michelangelo, her three daughters and a son, had all died of the plague. It was doubly dark, for Galileo had become hopelessly blind, "so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvellous discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations."

His last work was a short treatise on the secondary light of the moon. "I am obliged now," he said, sadly, "to have recourse to other hands and other pens than mine since my sad loss of sight. This, of course, occasions great loss of time, particularly now that my memory is impaired by advanced age; so that in placing my thoughts on paper, many and many a time I am forced to have the foregoing sentences read to me before I can tell what ought to follow; else I should repeat the same thing over and over."

He had planned other work, but death came on the evening of January 8, 1642, eight years after Celeste left him. His beloved pupils, Torricelli and Viviani, and his son Vincenzo, stood by his bedside.

He desired to be buried in the family vault of the Galilei in Santa Croce, at Florence, and the city at once voted a public funeral and three thousand crowns for a marble mausoleum. But the church at Rome prevented, lest the pernicious doctrine that the earth moves, should thereby have confirmation. He was therefore buried in an obscure corner of Del Noviziato, a side chapel of Santa Croce.

A century later, March 12, 1737, in the presence of the learned men of Italy, with great ceremony, the bones of Galileo were removed to a new resting-place in Santa Croce, and buried with his beloved friend, Viviani. An imposing monument was erected over him. The truth finally triumphed, as it always does. The works of Galileo, in sixteen volumes, are no longer prohibited, as they were in his lifetime.

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

In the same year, 1642, in which Galileo, sad and blind, went away from the earth, Sir Isaac Newton came to make his home upon it.

He was born December 25, the only child of Isaac Newton and Hannah Ayscough. The father died at thirty-seven, a few months after his marriage, and the young wife, after the birth of her child, was both father and mother to the helpless infant. He was so frail that there seemed little probability that he could live to manhood, or even boyhood. Naturally, between mother and son there grew a most ardent affection, which neither time nor death could change.

The manor-house of Woolsthorpe in Colsterworth, Lincoln county, was a two-story stone building, owned for a century by the Newton family, and bringing a limited income from the little farm in connection with it. Here Isaac passed his childhood, going to the schools near by, and learning to read, write, and cipher.

At twelve, he was sent to the public school at Grantham, where he showed little taste for study, and managed easily to stand at the foot of his class. When he was the last in the lowermost form but one, the boy next above him, as they were going to school, gave Isaac a kick, which occasioned severe pain. Stirred with wrath, Isaac challenged the other boy to a fight. For this purpose, they repaired to a neighboring churchyard, where young Newton, though much the smaller and weaker of the two, pounded his antagonist till he was glad to come to any terms of submission.

He resolved now that this boy should no longer stand above him in scholarship, and with a new ambition and energy born of his insult, he soon rose to the highest place in the school. It was not idleness, probably, that made Newton a poor scholar, but his mind was absorbed with making saws, hammers, hatchets, and other tools.