JOURNAT. AND PROCEEDINGS. 49 
distinguished literati of the day, gave breadth and polish to his 
robust intellect. When Milton wrote this great poem the basis of 
astronomical knowledge was shifting. The Almagest of Ptolemy, 
which taught the geocentric theory, had been the text book of 
science, ‘‘falsely so-called,” for more than fourteen centuries. The 
older Greek astronomers had conceived the heliocentric motions of 
the planets, but the ingenuous Ptolemy had flattered the egotism of 
man by brushing aside this theory and explaining the motions of 
the planets and sun and moon by a cumbrous mechanism of cycles 
and epicycles round the central earth, and as all that corresponded 
-so well with the old legends and myths, and had thus become inter- 
woven with the literature and the religion of these centuries, the 
Ptolemaic system sat enthroned. 
Students of prehistoric man trace the advancing history of our 
race by the records of the kitchen middens—the refuse of the food of 
primeval man, perhaps our arboreal ancestors—as they lie in strata 
now uncovered. And so we may to-day read the intellectual and 
scientific history of our race when we lay bare the strata of old 
doctrines and exploded theories, the debris of ages, the ‘‘ middens ” 
of old libraries. 
Milton in his early years visited Galileo, the great Italian phil- 
osopher. Two years before Milton saw him he had become totally 
blind, and thus the inventor of the telescope, the discoverer of 
Jupiter’s satellites, which showed a Copernican system in miniature 
_in the sky, was compelled to relinquish his favorite pursuit. His 
friend Castelli writes : ‘‘The noblest eye is darkened which nature 
ever made, an eye so privileged and gifted with such rare qualities 
that it may with trutb be said to have seen more than all of those 
eyes that are gone and to have opened the eyes of all who are to 
come.” Galileo endured his affliction with rare fortitude, and thus 
writes: ‘Alas, your dear friend and servant Galileo has become 
totally blind, so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which 
with wonderful observations I had enlarged a hundred and a thous- 
and times beyond the belief of bygone ages, henceforward for me is 
shrank into the narrow space which I myself fill in it. So it pleases 
God ; it shall then please me also.” 
We know not the details of that interview between the astrono- 
mer and the poet, who afterwards immortalized his name in heroic 
