420 HISTORY OF FORMAL ASTRONOMY. 



defence of all the ancient dogmas, and who was 

 represented as defeated at all points in the discus- 

 sion ; and he prefixed to the Dialogue a notice, To 

 the Discreet Reader,, in which, in a vein of trans- 

 parent irony, he assigned his reasons for the pub- 

 lication. " Some years ago," he says, " a wholesome 

 edict was promulgated at Rome, which, in order to 

 check the perilous scandals of the present age, 

 imposed silence upon the Pythagorean opinion of 

 the motion of the earth. There was not wanting," 

 he adds, "persons who rashly asserted that this 

 decree was the result, not of a judicious inquiry, 

 but of a passion ill-informed ; and complaints were 

 heard that counsellors, utterly unacquainted with 

 astronomical observations, ought not to be allowed, 

 with their undue prohibitions, to clip the wings of 

 speculative intellects. At the hearing of rash la- 

 mentations like these, my zeal could not keep 

 silence." And he then goes on to say that he 

 wishes, by the publication of his Dialogue, to show 

 that the subject had been fully examined at Rome. 

 The result of this was that Galileo was condemned 

 for his infraction of the injunction laid upon him in 

 1616; his Dialogue was prohibited; he himself 

 was commanded to abjure on his knees the doc- 

 trine which he had taught ; and this abjuration he 

 performed (R). 



This celebrated event must be looked upon 

 rather as a question of decorum than a struggle in 

 which the interests of truth and free inquiry were 



