ioo SECTION PHYSICS. 



ITALIAN INSTRUMENTS AT THE EXHIBITION OF SCIENTIFIC 

 APPARATUS. 



Professor DE ECCHER : Your Queen was graciously pleased per- 

 sonally to thank the city of Florence and Italy for having sent the 

 precious relics of Galileo and of the Accademia del Cimento to this 

 first great International Exhibition of Scientific Instruments. Allow 

 me, once more, to express here our most heartfelt and respectful 

 thanks for such high condescension ; which clearly shows how much 

 importance England attaches to the historical instruments which you 

 see before you. But with this accession to their value, I feel a pro- 

 portional increase in the difficulty I have of speaking of them briefly, 

 when thick volumes might easily be written upon them. I, therefore, 

 humbly beg of you to excuse me if I fall short of your expectations. 

 Having done my utmost in order that Florence should contribute her 

 most precious relics to this solemn exhibition, I felt it my duty to 

 accept the honourable, but at the same time onerous, task entrusted to 

 me of explaining to you something of the principal instruments 

 exhibited here. I am now present to discharge this duty. 



I will naturally begin with those of Galileo. 



This great man, born at Pisa on the i8th of February, 1564, was 

 destined by his father for the medical profession ; but in the year 1589, 

 we find him mathematical lecturer at the university of his native town. 

 His powerful intellect, adapting itself badly to the uncertainties of the 

 art of medicine, had succeeded, almost unassisted, in mastering the 

 exact sciences the only ones which could satisfy his craving to scruti- 

 nize and become acquainted with Nature. When he was yet but a 

 student at Pisa, he made the celebrated observation of the oscillations 

 of the lamp, equable through different arcs, from which he afterwards 

 deduced the theory of the pendulum and of the fall of weights. Here 

 are two photographs of portions of Galileo's gallery. This third one 

 shows the whole of the monument raised by grateful Tuscany to the 

 memory of the creator of modern science. In the first one you see the 

 student Galileo watching the oscillation of the lamp in the famous 

 cathedral of Pisa ; in the second, Galileo, as -mathematical lecturer, 

 repeating the experiments on the fall of bodies on inclined planes ; 



