20 SPECIAL RESULTS OF OBSERVATION IN THE DOMAIN 



Monde), was finally to have been sent to press at the con- 

 clusion of 1633 ; but the report of the sentence passed upon 

 Galileo in the Inquisition at Rome (which was only made 

 known four months later, in October, 1633, by Gassendi 

 and Bouillaud), arrested its progress, and deprived the 

 world of a great work, executed with so much labour and 

 care. The motives for its non-publication were the love of 

 a quiet and peaceful life in his retirement at Dev enter, and 

 a pious anxiety not to shew himself disrespectful to the 

 Pope's decree against the Earth's planetary motion. ( 35 ) 

 It was not until 1664, fourteen years after the philosopher's 

 death, that some fragments of the work were printed 

 under the strange title of " Le Monde, ou Traite de la Lu- 

 miere." ( 36 ) The three chapters which treat of Light hardly 

 form a fourth part of the whole. On the other hand the 

 sections which belonged originally to Descartes' Cosmos, 

 and contained considerations on the motion and.solar distance 

 of the planets, on terrestrial magnetism, on tides, and on 

 earthquakes and volcanoes, were transferred to the third 

 and fourth parts of the celebrated work entitled " Principes 

 de la Philosophic." 



The " Kosmotheoros" of Huygens, which was not pub- 

 lished until after his death, notwithstanding its high-sound- 

 ing and significant name, hardly deserves to be mentioned 

 in this enumeration of cosmical essays. It contains the 

 dreams and conjectures of a great man on the vegetable and 

 animal worlds of distant heavenly bodies, and especially on 

 the altered forms under which mankind may appear there. 

 One seems to be reading Kepler's " Somnium Astronomi- 

 cum/' or Kircher's " Ecstatic Journey." As Huygens al- 

 ready, like the astronomers of the present day, allowed to 



