GALILEO GALILEI. 5 



Perhaps no person can be really great who has 

 not learned patience, and Galileo had many lessons 

 in this virtue before he died. 



Through the influence of the marquis, he was 

 brought to the notice of Ferdinand I., reigning 

 Grand Duke, who appointed him. to the mathe- 

 matical professorship at Pisa. This was a great 

 honor for a young man of twenty-six, one who had 

 been too poor to take his degree. The salary was 

 small, less than twenty pounds a year; but ho 

 earned somewhat by the practice of medicine, by 

 lectures on Dante and other literary subjects, and 

 by lessons to private pupils. Of course, he had 

 little or no leisure ; but he thus learned one of the 

 most valuable lessons of life, to treasure time as 

 though it were gold. How glad his father and 

 mother must have been that their wool projects 

 had come to naught ! 



The professors at Pisa, with a single exception, 

 Jacopo Mazzoni, in the chair of philosophy, were 

 opposed to the new-comer. They were all disciples 

 of Aristotle, and had not Galileo, when a boy 

 among them, dared to oppose the great Grecian ? 

 And now, to make matters worse, he had taken 

 some friends to the top of the Leaning Tower, and 

 had put to the test the belief of two thousand 

 years, that the rate at which a body falls de- 

 pends upon its weight. When the different weights 

 fell to the pavement at the foot of the Leaning 

 Tower, at the same time, the learned were as- 

 tonished. If Aristotle could be wrong in one 



