GALILEO AND HIS JUDGES. 3 



St. Thomas Aquinas. This celebrated writer quotes 

 him as " philosophus," in his opinion the philosopher 

 par excellence, and besides his general appreciation 

 of him as thus shown, he wrote an elaborate treatise 

 on the "Astronomy" of Aristotle. 



Nor has this influence been confined to the school- 

 men ; it has remained ever since, even to this day and 

 in this country, where in the University of Oxford his 

 great work on ethics is still a standard book of study. 

 At the time of Galileo, such was the reverence felt 

 towards his authority in Italy and in Home, that the 

 Peripatetici, as those who specially belonged to his 

 school were called, were probably quite as indignant 

 with the revolutionary astronomer for disregarding 

 the teaching of their philosopher, as for going counter 

 to the literal interpretation of Scripture. 



But in pure astronomy, apart from all other 

 philosophy, the greatest of all ancient writers was 

 Ptolemy, who in the second century of the Christian 

 era wrote a work called the " Almagest," which is a 

 complete compendium of the science as known at that 

 date. Ptolemy probably borrowed very much from 

 his great predecessor, Hipparchus, who has been called 

 the father of astronomy, and who was the first to 

 discover to take a remarkable instance the phe- 

 nomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, 

 involving as it does the difference in length between 

 the solar and sidereal years. The system of Ptolemy 

 was briefly this : The heavens and the Earth are 

 both spherical in form the Earth being immovable in 



B 2 



