n6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lished at the expense of the Academy, several years later. It is 

 curious to find prefaced to this edition a brief, dated 1627, of Pope 

 Urban VIII, in praise of the Academy. 



Cesi dedicated his work on his microscopic studies of the bee 

 to the same Pope. 



When we remember that this was the Pope under whom 

 Galileo was condemned, we learn to what extent the casuistry of 

 the day carried men, when it allowed the Pope to praise science 

 yet condemn the results of science, and to lead the Linceans, as 

 indeed Galileo himself, to insist that the Copernican system was 

 not necessarily true in fact, but true ex hypothesi. 



So long as Cesi could remain at the head of the Academy it 

 continued to flourish, but began to suffer and decline after he was 

 obliged to remove from Rome to his estates, about a hundred 

 miles from the capital. 



The old duke, by his reckless and extravagant mode of life, 

 had so involved the estates that they became unremunerative. 

 So, with characteristic selfishness, after reserving for himself an 

 annuity, he turned over the estates to his son, who assumed all 

 debts. 



Cesi bravely struggled to meet these extra responsibilities and 

 cares, and bore with uncomplaining patience the increased petu- 

 lance and tyranny of his father, but his slender frame was un- 

 equal to the task, and in a few weeks after his father's death he 

 was laid beside him in the grave, having died on the 2d of August, 

 1630, in his forty-fifth year. 



A charming, learned, noble-minded man, he died too soon for 

 science, a victim of filial duty. "What Cesi had done for others 

 he failed to have done for himself, for the result of his own labors, 

 Tlieatrum Natures., was never published, but remains in manu- 

 script, in the Albani Library at Rome, to this day. Cesi was one 

 of the earliest to make accurate observations on fossil woods, and 

 to discover the system of propagation of ferns. 



The Academy struggled on for twenty years after Cesi's death, 

 and finally lapsed, to be revived again in 1784, since which time 

 it has forced itself into the fore-front of the scientific bodies of 

 Europe. 



The unfortunate circumstance attending the lapse of the Ac- 

 cademia dei Lincei was the lack of unity of the states of Italy, 

 each state or republic having its own academy, thus precluding a 

 strong central representative body, such as the Royal Society of 

 London, the Institute of France, the Academy of Sciences at Ber- 

 lin, and the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg, stood in rela- 

 tion to their own kingdom. The Accademia del Cimento at 

 Florence, and the Academies at Bologna, Turin, Milan, Naples, all 

 flourished at different times under the presidency of some great 



