CHAPTER XVI 

 GALILEO AND THE OPTIC TUBE 



YE who listen with credulity to the teaching of authority, and 

 pursue with eagerness the fictions of life, who believe that human 

 goodness may survive the temptations of power, or that the 

 virtues of a religion are exemplified in the deeds of its adherents, 

 attend to the melancholy history of a prince of the human mind. 



A few years after the birth of Francis Bacon, a few months 

 before that of Shakespeare, and on the day that Michael Angelo 

 was closing his long and stormy career in Rome, the wife of 

 Vincenzo de Galilei, descendant of a noble Florentine family, 

 brought into the world the child who came to be known by 

 his forename of Galileo. The father was poor ; he was a 

 musician, something of a mathematician too ; he even wrote a 

 book defending the freedom of scientific inquiry. He was poor, 

 and he had no mind that his son should follow the same hard 

 path as he. He thought to make of the boy a cloth-dealer ; 

 it was no use. In school he showed the most precocious talent, 

 out of school he was for ever inventing mechanical toys. This 

 was not the stuff for a shopkeeper ; so, at a hard sacrifice, the 

 boy is given a chance to attend the university in his native 

 town of Pisa. The Medici in their glory had endeavoured to 

 make it a rival of the schools of Bologna and Padua ; they had 

 done well by it. There was none better anywhere. 



The boy is now destined to be a physician. He shall at 

 least follow the most lucrative of the sciences, if his bent be 

 that way. His mathematical father knows to his cost how 

 little mathematics are prized ; the chair in the University of 

 Pisa receives the magnificent salary of sevenpence-halfpenny 

 a day. Old Vincenzo will save his son from that ; but fate 

 is strong. 



The family is a good Catholic one, so is the boy ; but his 

 mind is restless. On his knees one day in the cathedral, his 



wandering eye watches the swing of a great lamp which the 



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