204 CHILDHOOD OF SCIENCE. 



its work was as much an impossibility as for the sun to hold back 

 its rajs. Come what might in the bitter end, his call was to 

 think, to experiment, and to teach. 



It was in the year 1609 that a report came to Galileo that 

 Metius, a Dutch optician, had succeeded in so combining two 

 lenses as to make distant objects seem near. More was not told, 

 nor needed. The next day Galileo had a telescope that tripled 

 the breadth of objects ; and in a few weeks he had constructed 

 one which magnified thirty-two diameters. This wonderful tube 

 he first pointed to the moon ; and with what amazement he saw 

 for the first time those rugged mountains and chasms, those deep 

 fissures and lava streams sweep across the field of view, you who 

 have ever sat down to the sight may faintly conceive. Here was 

 another world like the one we tread on, vast and mountain-girt, 

 circling on in its unsustained flight about the earth, at once the 

 long desired analogy to the earth revolving about the sun, and a 

 final answer to the old dogma of the schools that the heavenly 

 bodies were divine and therefore beyond the sphere of reasoning 

 or of causation. What could be more unspiritual than mountain 

 chains and crater vortices? 



Again he turned his magnifying gaze to Venus, and with a 

 joy that was well nigh ecstacy he beheld the horns and the cres- 

 cent, as Copernicus had predicted a hundred years before they 

 should appear to an enlarged vision. Could he longer doubt that^ 

 Yenus was one of the children of the sun ? Pushing still out- 

 ward his gaze he saw for the first time the four moons that wheel 

 obedient to the influence of Jupiter. Might he not call them 

 the grand-children of the same great parent of light and of life? 

 Mars in his telescope waxed and waned as the moon in full quar- 

 ters. While Saturn with its rings seemed like three vast worlds 



^ 



overlapping each other. Is it strange then that this great world- 

 discoverer should arise each night from his sublime disclosures 

 more and more convinced of the comparative littleness of this 

 globe of ours, of the insufficiency and the arrogance of that 

 philosophy which made it the center of the universe and the sole 

 object of creation ? Is it a wonder that his mind was exalted 

 above the bigotry of a creed-bound faith to the worship of that 



