60 



GALILEE 



GALILEI 



it is 13 miles long by 6 broad, and 820 feet deep. 

 It occupies the bottom of a great basin, and 

 is undoubtedly of volcanic origin. Although the 

 Jordan runs into it red and turbid from the north, 

 and many warm and brackish springs also find 

 their way thither, its waters are cool, clear, and 

 sweet. Its shores on the east and north sides are 

 bare and rocky ; on the west sloping gradually, 

 and luxuriantly covered with vegetation. The 

 surrounding scenery is hardly beautiful, but 'its 

 associations are the most sacred in the world. It 

 is enough to mention the names of some of the 

 towns on its shores, Bethsaida, Capernaum, 

 Magdala, and Tiberias. In the time of Jesus 

 the region round about was the most densely 

 populated in Galilee ; now even its fisheries are 

 almost entirely neglected. 



Galilee, the name applied to a porch or chapel 

 attached to a church, in which penitents stood, 

 processions were formed, and corpses deposited for 

 a time previous to interment. In some religious 

 houses the galilee was the only part of the church 

 accessible to women ; the monks came to the 

 galilee to see their female relatives the women 

 being told in the words of Scripture, ' He goeth 

 before you into Galilee : there shall you see him ' 

 ( Matt, xxviii. 7 ). A portion of the nave was some- 

 times marked oft' by a step, or, as at Durham, by a 

 line of blue marble, to mark the boundary to which 

 women were limited. There are galilees in the 

 cathedrals of Lincoln ( on west side of south tran- 

 sept), Ely (at west end of nave), and Durham 

 ( west end of nave ). 



Galilei, GALILE'O, one of the fathers of experi- 

 mental science, was born at Pisa on the 18th of 

 February 1564. By the desire of his father, the 

 descendant of an ancient Florentine family, Galileo 

 directed his early studies to medicine, and of course 

 the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy ; but the 

 dogmas of this last he soon ventured to disbelieve 

 and despise. Entering the university of Pisa in 

 1581, he made there two years later one of his most 

 important discoveries. Happening to observe the 

 oscillations of a bronze lamp in the cathedral of 

 Pisa, he was struck with the fact that the oscilla- 

 tions, no matter what their range, seemed to be 

 accomplished in equal times. The correctness of this 

 observation he at once proceeded to test, and then, 

 comparing the beat of his own pulse with the action 

 of the pendulum, he concluded that by means of this 

 equality of oscillation the simple pendulum might 

 be made an invaluable agent in the exact measure- 

 ment of time, a discovery which he utilised some 

 fifty years later in the construction of an astro- 

 nomical clock. About this time his irrepressible 

 bias towards mechanical constructions and experi- 

 mental science received a new impulse from his 

 introduction to the principles of mathematics. The 

 first fruit of his ardent pursuits of the new studies 

 was the invention of a hydrostatic balance and the 

 composition of a treatise on the specific gravity of 

 solid bodies. These achievements secured him the 

 appointment of professor of Mathematics in the 

 university of Pisa, where he propounded the novel 

 theorem, that all falling bodies, great or small, 

 descend with equal velocity, and proved its correct- 

 ness by several experiments made from the summit 

 of the leaning tower of Pisa. This provoked the 

 enmity of the Aristotelians, whose bitterness was 

 exacerbated by the cutting sarcasms of the 

 successful demonstrator. Nevertheless Galileo in 

 1591 deemed it prudent to resign his chair at Pisa, 

 and retire to Florence, though another cause has 

 been assigned for his resignation viz. that he 

 ridiculed the mechanical pretensions of Giovanni 

 de' Medici, son of Cosmo I. 



In the following year he was nominated to the 



chair of Mathematics in the university of Padua, 

 where his lectures attracted crowds of pupils from 

 all parts of Europe. Here he taught and worked 

 for eighteen years, from 1592 to 1610. It may be 

 remarked parenthetically that he was the first to 

 adapt the Italian idiom to philosophical instruc- 

 tion. Among the various discoveries with -which 

 he enriched science may be noticed a species of 

 thermometer, a proportional compass or sector, 

 and, more important than all, the refracting tele- 

 scope for astronomical investigation. This last, 

 however, he seems not to have invented entirely 

 independently : an account of an instrument for 

 enlarging distant objects, invented by a Dutchman, 

 seems to have reached him whilst on a visit to 

 Venice in May 1609; thereupon setting his invent- 

 ive wits to work, he constructed an apparatus 

 involving the principles of the telescope. Rapidly 

 improving the construction of his original instru- 

 ment, Galileo now began a series of astronomical 

 investigations, all of which tended to convince him 

 still more of the correctness of the Copernican 

 heliocentric theory of the heavens, of the truth of 

 whicli he seems indeed to have been early per- 

 suaded. He concluded that the moon, instead of 

 being a self-luminous and perfectly smooth sphere, 

 owed her illumination to reflection, and that she 

 presented an unequal surface, diversified by valleys 

 and mountains. The Milky-way he pronounced 

 a track of countless separate stars. Still more 

 important, however, was the series of observa- 

 tions which led to the discovery of the four satel- 

 lites of Jupiter on the night of the 7th of January 

 1610 (though it was not till the 13th of the same 

 month that he came to the conclusion that they 

 were satellites, and not fixed stars), which he 

 named the Medicean stars, in honour of his pro- 

 tectors, the Medici family. He also first noticed 

 movable spots on the disc of the sun, from which 

 he inferred the rotation of that orb. In this year 

 he was recalled to Florence by the Grand-duke of 

 Tuscany, who nominated him his philosopher and 

 mathematician extraordinary, gave him a good 

 salary, and exacted from him no duties save those 

 of prosecuting his scientific investigations untram- 

 melled. At Florence, continuing his astronomical 

 observations, he discovered the triple form of 

 Saturn and the phases of Venus and of Mars. 



In 1611 Galileo visited Rome and was received 

 with great distinction, being enrolled a member of 

 the Lincei Academy. Yet the publication, two 

 years later, of his Dissertation on the Solar Spots, in 

 which he openly and boldly professed his adhesion 

 to the Copernican view, provoked against him the 

 censure and warning of the ecclesiastical authori- 

 ties. But this he partly brought upon himself by 

 his aggressive attitude towards the champions of 

 orthodoxy and even towards the Scriptures, whose 

 astronomical system he hesitated not to challenge. 

 Galileo, however, promised (26th February 1616) to 

 obey Pope Paul V.'s injunction, thenceforward not 

 to 'hold, teach, or defend' the condemned doc- 

 trines. After that he seems to have been again taken 

 into favour by the pope and other high dignitaries 

 of the church ; indeed personally he seems never 

 to have lost their esteem. But in 1632, ignoring 

 his pledge, he published the Dialogo sopra i 

 due, massimi Sistemi del Mondo, a work written in 

 the form of a dialogue between three fictitious 

 interlocutors, the one in favour of the Copernican 

 system, the second an advocate of the Ptolemaic, 

 and the third a well-meaning but stupid supporter 

 of the Aristotelian school. Hardly had the work 

 been issued when it was given over to the jurisdio- 

 tion of the Inquisition. Pope Urban VIII., previ- 

 ously Cardinal Barberini, a friend and admirer of 

 Galileo, was led to believe that Galileo had satirised 

 him in this work in the person of the third inter- 



