76 GALILEO AND HIS JUDGES. 



plicio, as I said above, is not a fool, but as a 

 personage in a scientific argument he is lamentably 

 deficient. 



Simplicio at the end of the Dialogue urges that God 

 could, in His infinite power, cause the tides by some 

 other means than those suggested by Salviati, to 

 which true and pious (though, perhaps, rather irrele- 

 vant) argument the latter respectfully and devoutly 

 assents. 



The concluding sentences are said, as I have re- 

 marked elsewhere, to have been recast or retouched 

 by Father Riccardi. 



It is worth noticing that there is a passage in the 

 fourth day's dialogue, in which the author alludes to 

 the fact of the Sun being apparently longer by about 

 nine days in passing along the ecliptic from the 

 spring to the autumn equinox, than in passing from 

 the autumnal to the vernal ; that is to say, of the 

 northern hemisphere having so much longer summer 

 than winter, and he treats it as one of the recondite 

 problems of astronomy not as yet understood. This 

 is an additional proof that for some reason or another 

 he had not made himself acquainted with Kepler's 

 researches ; for as soon as it became known that the 

 planets move, not in circles, but in ellipses, with the 

 Sun in one of the foci, it was obvious that there 

 would be in every case (though in some more than 

 others) this inequality to which allusion has been 

 made, and the Earth, if a planet, would be subject to 

 the same rule as the rest. 



