Galileo at Arcetri—Becomes Blind—Moon's Libration—Publication of the Dialogues on Motion.

We have already alluded to the imperfect state of the knowledge possessed with regard to Galileo's domestic life and personal habits; there is reason however to think that unpublished materials exist from which these outlines might be in part filled up. Venturi informs us that he had seen in the collection from which he derived a great part of the substance of his Memoirs of Galileo, about one hundred and twenty manuscript letters, dated between the years 1623 and 1633, addressed to him by his daughter Maria, who with her sister had attached herself to the convent of St. Matthew, close to Galileo's usual place of residence. It is difficult not to think that much interesting information might be obtained from these, with respect to Galileo's domestic character. The very few published extracts confirm our favourable impressions of it, and convey a pleasing idea of this his favourite daughter. Even when, in her affectionate eagerness to soothe her father's wounded feelings at the close of his imprisonment in Rome, she dwells with delight upon her hopes of being allowed to relieve him, by taking on herself the penitential recitations which formed a part of his sentence, the prevalent feeling excited in every one by the perusal must surely be sympathy with the filial tenderness which it is impossible to misunderstand.

The joy she had anticipated in again meeting her parent, and in compensating to him by her attentive affection the insults of his malignant enemies, was destined to be but of short duration. Almost in the same month in which Galileo returned to Arcetri she was seized with a fatal illness; and already in the beginning of April, 1634, we learn her death from the fruitless condolence of his friends. He was deeply and bitterly affected by this additional blow, which came upon him when he was himself in a weak and declining state of health, and his answers breathe a spirit of the most hopeless and gloomy despondency.

In a letter written in April to Bocchineri, his son's father-in-law, he says: "The hernia has returned worse than at first: my pulse is intermitting, accompanied with a palpitation of the heart; an immeasurable sadness and melancholy; an entire loss of appetite; I am hateful to myself; and in short I feel that I am called incessantly by my dear daughter. In this state, I do not think it advisable that Vincenzo should set out on his journey, and leave me, when every hour something may occur, which would make it expedient that he should be here." In this extremity of ill health, Galileo requested leave to go to Florence for the advantage of medical assistance; but far from obtaining permission, it was intimated that any additional importunities would be noticed by depriving him of the partial liberty he was then allowed to enjoy. After several years confinement at Arcetri, during the whole of which time he suffered from continual indisposition, the inquisitor Fariano wrote to him in 1638, that the Pope permitted his removal to Florence, for the purpose of recovering his health; requiring him at the same time to present himself at the Office of the Inquisition, where he would learn the conditions on which this favour had been granted. These were that he should neither quit his house nor receive his friends there; and so closely was the letter of these instructions adhered to, that he was obliged to obtain a special permission to go out to attend mass during Passion week. The strictness with which all personal intercourse with his friends was interrupted, is manifest from the result of the following letter from the Duke of Tuscany's secretary of state to Nicolini, his ambassador at Rome. "Signor Galileo Galilei, from his great age and the illnesses which afflict him, is in a condition soon to go to another world; and although in this the eternal memory of his fame and value is already secured, yet his Highness is greatly desirous that the world should sustain as little loss as possible by his death; that his labours may not perish, but for the public good may be brought to that perfection which he will not be able to give them. He has in his thoughts many things worthy of him, which he cannot be prevailed on to communicate to any but Father Benedetto Castelli, in whom he has entire confidence. His Highness wishes therefore that you should see Castelli, and induce him to procure leave to come to Florence for a few months for this purpose, which his Highness has very much at heart; and if he obtains permission, as his Highness hopes, you will furnish him with money and every thing else he may require for his journey." Castelli, it will be remembered, was at this time salaried by the court of Rome. Nicolini answered that Castelli had been himself to the Pope to ask leave to go to Florence. Urban immediately intimated his suspicions that his design was to see Galileo, and upon Castelli's stating that certainly it would be impossible for him to refrain from attempting to see him, he received permission to visit him in the company of an officer of the Inquisition. At the end of some months Galileo was remanded to Arcetri, which he never again quitted.

In addition to his other infirmities, a disorder which some years before had affected the sight of his right eye returned in 1636; in the course of the ensuing year the other eye began to fail also, and in a few months he became totally blind. It would be difficult to find any even among those who are the most careless to make a proper use of the invaluable blessing of sight, who could bear unmoved to be deprived of it, but on Galileo the loss fell with peculiar and terrible severity; on him who had boasted that he would never cease from using the senses which God had given him, in declaring the glory of his works, and the business of whose life had been the splendid fulfilment of that undertaking. "The noblest eye is darkened," said Castelli, "which nature ever made: an eye so privileged, and gifted with such rare qualities, that it may with truth be said to have seen more than all of those who are gone, and to have opened the eyes of all who are to come." His own patience and resignation under this fatal calamity are truly wonderful; and if occasionally a word of complaint escaped him, it was in the chastened tone of the following expressions—"Alas! your dear friend and servant Galileo has become totally and irreparably blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which with wonderful observations I had enlarged a hundred and thousand times beyond the belief of by-gone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into the narrow space which I myself fill in it.—So it pleases God: it shall therefore please me also." Hopes were at first entertained by Galileo's friends, that the blindness was occasioned by cataracts, and that he might look forward to relief from the operation of couching; but it very soon appeared that the disorder was not in the humours of the eye, but in a cloudiness of the cornea, the symptoms of which all external remedies failed to alleviate.

As long as the power was left him, he had indefatigably continued his astronomical observations. Just before his sight began to decay, he had observed a new phenomenon in the moon, which is now known by the name of the moon's libration, the nature of which we will shortly explain. A remarkable circumstance connected with the moon's motion is, that the same side is always visible from the earth, showing that the moon turns once on her own axis in exactly the time of her monthly revolution.[114] But Galileo, who was by this time familiar with the whole of the moon's visible surface, observed that the above-mentioned effect does not accurately take place, but that a small part on either side comes alternately forward into sight, and then again recedes, according to the moon's various positions in the heavens. He was not long in detecting one of the causes of this apparent libratory or rocking motion. It is partly occasioned by our distance as spectators from the centre of the earth, which is also the centre of the moon's motion. In consequence of this, as the moon rises in the sky we get an additional view of the lower half, and lose sight of a small part of the upper half which was visible to us while we were looking down upon her when low in the horizon. The other cause is not quite so simple, nor is it so certain that Galileo adverted to it: it is however readily intelligible even to those who are unacquainted with astronomy, if they will receive as a fact that the monthly motion of the moon is not uniform, but that she moves quicker at one time than another, whilst the motion of rotation on her own axis, like that of the earth, is perfectly uniform. A very little reflection will show that the observed phenomenon will necessarily follow. If the moon did not turn on her axis, every side of her would be successively presented, in the course of a month, towards the earth; it is the motion of rotation which tends to carry the newly discovered parts out of sight.

Let us suppose the moon to be in that part of her orbit where she moves with her average motion, and that she is moving towards the part where she moves most quickly. If the motion in the orbit were to remain the same all the way round, the motion of rotation would be just sufficient at every point to bring round the same part of the moon directly in front of the earth. But since, from the supposed point, the moon is moving for some time round the earth with a motion continually growing quicker, the motion of rotation is not sufficiently quick to carry out of sight the entire part discovered by the motion of translation. We therefore get a glimpse of a narrow strip on the side from which the moon is moving, which strip grows broader and broader, till she passes the point where she moves most swiftly, and reaches the point of average swiftness on the opposite side of her orbit. Her motion is now continually growing slower, and therefore from this point the motion of rotation is too swift, and carries too much out of sight, or in other words, brings into sight a strip on the side towards which the moon is moving. This increases till she passes the point of least swiftness, and arrives at the point from which we began to trace her course, and the phenomena are repeated in the same order.

This interesting observation closes the long list of Galileo's discoveries in the heavens. After his abjuration, he ostensibly withdrew himself in a great measure from his astronomical pursuits, and employed himself till 1636 principally with his Dialogues on Motion, the last work of consequence that he published. In that year he entered into correspondence with the Elzevirs, through his friend Micanzio, on the project of printing a complete edition of his writings. Among the letters which Micanzio wrote on the subject is one intimating that he had enjoyed the gratification, in his quality of Theologian to the Republic of Venice, of refusing his sanction to a work written against Galileo and Copernicus. The temper however in which this refusal was announced, contrasts singularly with that of the Roman Inquisitors. "A book was brought to me which a Veronese Capuchin has been writing, and wished to print, denying the motion of the earth. I was inclined to let it go, to make the world laugh, for the ignorant beast entitles every one of the twelve arguments which compose his book, 'An irrefragable and undeniable demonstration,' and then adduces nothing but such childish trash as every man of sense has long discarded. For instance, this poor animal understands so much geometry and mathematics, that he brings forward as a demonstration, that if the earth could move, having nothing to support it, it must necessarily fall. He ought to have added that then we should catch all the quails. But when I saw that he speaks indecently of you, and has had the impudence to put down an account of what passed lately, saying that he is in possession of the whole of your process and sentence, I desired the man who brought it to me to go and be hanged. But you know the ingenuity of impertinence; I suspect he will succeed elsewhere, because he is so enamoured of his absurdities, that he believes them more firmly than his Bible."

After Galileo's condemnation at Rome, he had been placed by the Inquisition in the list of authors the whole of whose writings, 'edita et edenda,' were strictly forbidden. Micanzio could not even obtain permission to reprint the Essay on Floating Bodies, in spite of his protestations that it did not in any way relate to the Copernican theory. This was the greatest stigma with which the Inquisition were in the habit of branding obnoxious authors; and, in consequence of it, when Galileo had completed his Dialogues on Motion, he found great difficulty in contriving their publication, the nature of which may be learned from the account which Pieroni sent to Galileo of his endeavours to print them in Germany. He first took the manuscript to Vienna, but found that every book printed there must receive the approbation of the Jesuits; and Galileo's old antagonist, Scheiner, happening to be in that city, Pieroni feared lest he should interfere to prevent the publication altogether, if the knowledge of it should reach him. Through the intervention of Cardinal Dietrichstein, he therefore got permission to have it printed at Olmutz, and that it should be approved by a Dominican, so as to keep the whole business a secret from Scheiner and his party; but during this negociation the Cardinal suddenly died, and Pieroni being besides dissatisfied with the Olmutz type, carried back the manuscript to Vienna, from which he heard that Scheiner had gone into Silesia. A new approbation was there procured, and the work was just on the point of being sent to press, when the dreaded Scheiner re-appeared in Vienna, on which Pieroni again thought it advisable to suspend the impression till his departure. In the mean time his own duty as a military architect in the Emperor's service carried him to Prague, where Cardinal Harrach, on a former occasion, had offered him the use of the newly-erected University press. But Harrach happened not to be at Prague, and this plan like the rest became abortive. In the meantime Galileo, wearied with these delays, had engaged with Louis Elzevir, who undertook to print the Dialogues at Amsterdam.

It is abundantly evident from Galileo's correspondence that this edition was printed with his full concurrence, although, in order to obviate further annoyance, he pretended that it was pirated from a manuscript copy which he sent into France to the Comte de Noailles, to whom the work is dedicated. The same dissimulation had been previously thought necessary, on occasion of the Latin translation of "The Dialogues on the System," by Bernegger, which Galileo expressly requested through his friend Deodati, and of which he more than once privately signified his approbation, presenting the translator with a valuable telescope, although he publicly protested against its appearance. The story which Bernegger introduced in his preface, tending to exculpate Galileo from any share in the publication, is by his own confession a mere fiction. Noailles had been ambassador at Rome, and, by his conduct there, well deserved the compliment which Galileo paid him on the present occasion.

As an introduction to the account of this work, which Galileo considered the best he had ever produced, it will become necessary to premise a slight sketch of the nature of the mechanical philosophy which he found prevailing, nearly as it had been delivered by Aristotle, with the same view with which we introduced specimens of the astronomical opinions current when Galileo began to write on that subject: they serve to show the nature and objects of the reasoning which he had to oppose; and, without some exposition of them, the aim and value of many of his arguments would be imperfectly understood and appreciated.