GALILEO AND HIS JUDGES. 139 



It ought to be clearly understood that from the 

 moment the telescope was turned on the heavens, 

 the old system of astronomy was doomed, and nothing 

 could finally have saved it. For a time prejudice 

 and other more creditable feelings kept it floating on 

 the sea of speculation, but such a state of things 

 could not last; and the startling information that 

 men like Galileo, Fabricius, and Scheiner imparted 

 to the scientific world, could not fail to expel the 

 old theory of the universe from the minds of men 

 at least, men of intellectual capacity gradually and 

 slowly, but yet most surely. 



Now we have seen what the revelations were which 

 the telescope at once displayed, even in its compara- 

 tively rude and imperfect state. There were the 

 spots on the Sun, the satellites of Jupiter, the phases 

 of Venus, the greater apparent size of the superior 

 planets (Mars and the rest) when on the opposite 

 side of the Earth from the Sun, this last phenomenon 

 being quite inconsistent with the system of Ptolemy. 



One consequence of all this was that the less 

 enlightened men of the old school indulged in a 

 violent antipathy to the new-fangled instrument, 

 which threatened to overthrow their time-honoured 

 traditions, and simply refused to believe in the 

 telescope and its results. Thus the principal pro- 

 fessor of philosophy at Padua, when invited by 

 Galileo to look through his glass at the Moon and 

 the planets, pertinaciously refused to do so. Sim- 

 plicio, who, of course, represents in the Dialogue the 



