66 Borelli and the Influence [lect. 



frequently delivering discourses at her academy, discourses 

 which however he did not think worthy of being published. 

 For three years he continued thus under her patronage, though 

 living in his own house on the slender means which he 

 still retained and on the help which she gave him. He kept 

 on labouring at his book on animal motion, the expenses of the 

 publication of which Christina undertook to defray ; and in 

 1676 the work was so near completion that Borelli felt justified 

 in writing the dedication to her. 



The pecuniary aid which Borelli received from Queen 

 Christina was somewhat uncertain, owing to the fitful way in 

 which her remittances arrived from Sweden. In 1677 a heavy 

 blow fell upon him ; his private servant robbed him of all his 

 little money, and indeed all his property ; and need led him to 

 take up his abode among the Society of the Scholae Pise of San 

 Pantaleone, where he dwelt for two years, giving the penultimate 

 touches to his great work, which as he said he had promised to 

 the world twenty-four years before, and earning his board and 

 lodging by teaching mathematics to the young scholars of the 

 society. The last touches which were needed he did not live 

 to give ; before the book had left the press he was seized with 

 a pleurisy, and on the last day of 1679, just as the new year 

 was coming in, he passed away. The pupil of Galileo, like his 

 master, bowed before the power of the Church, and an ecclesiastic 

 dignitary, writing the preface to the work of Borelli, published 

 the year after his death, breaks out into praises of the pious 

 life of the great man of science, especially commending him in 

 that when in his lectures on astronomy he had to speak of 

 ' systems ' he maintained the authority of the Church. " What- 

 " ever others may have taught, it is our duty, he used to say, 

 " not to listen to it. As the Holy Church teaches so ought we 

 " to believe, and obeying her, to hold as true whatever she lays 

 "down." 



Borelli was essentially a mathematician and a physicist ; of 

 his valuable contributions to these sciences this is not the place 

 to speak. The problems of the living body were not to him, 

 as they had been to Vesalius and Harvey, the object of a first 

 love. Their care had been to find an answer to the biological 



