GALILEO. 
Committed prisoner to the apartments of 
the Fiscal of the Holy Office. After- 
wards, through the intercession of the 
Grand Duke, he was permitted to reside in 
the house of his embassador, while the. pro- 
cess was carrying on against him. After 
his trial had lasted about two months, he 
was brought up to receive sentence in full 
congregation ; when he was ordered, in the 
most solemn manner, to abjure and con- 
demn the Copernican system, as contrary to 
the Scriptures, and to bind himself, by 
oath, no longer to teach or support it, 
either directly or indirectly. As a punish- 
ment for having disobeyed the former de- 
cree of the court, he was condemned to be 
detained in the prisons of the Holy Office 
during the pleasure of the Cardinal Inqui- 
sitors, and enjoined, as a saving penance, 
for three years to come, to repeat, once a 
week, the seven penetential psalms, the 
court reserving to themselves the power of 
moderating, changing, and taking away 
altogether, or in part, the above-mentioned 
punishment and penance. His Dialogues 
were also censured, prohibited, and ordered 
to be burnt at Rome. 
Pope Urban VIII. who at that time sat 
on the Pontifical throne, lessened the ri- 
gour of his sentence, by confining him for a 
time to the palace and garden de Medici at 
Rome ; after which he was sent to the archi- 
episcopal palace at Sienna, where the air 
was more favourable to his state of health ; 
and in the course of the year, 1634, he was 
permitted to reside at his country-house, at 
Ancetri, in the vicinity of Florence. 
In this place he spent the remainder of 
his days, visited and esteemed by the most 
distinguished characters in Florence, and 
diligently applying himself to his celestial 
observations. By his continual use of the 
telescope, however, and the injuries which 
his eyes received from the nocturnal air, his 
sight was gradually impaired, till he became 
entirely blind about three years before his 
death. This calamity he bore with a truly 
philosophical resignation, employing himself 
in constant meditation and enquiry, the re- 
sult of which he intended to communicate 
to the world. He had digested much mat- 
ter, and had begun to dictate his concepti- 
ons, when he was attacked by a distemper 
which terminated in his death, in 1642, when 
he was in tiie seventy-eighth year of his age. 
Galileo was small in stature, but of a ve- 
nerable aspect, and of a vigorous constitution. 
His learning was very extensive ; and he 
possessed in a high degree, a clearness 
and acuteness of wit. In company he was 
free and affable, and full of pleasantry. 
He took great delight in Architecture and 
Painting, and designed extremely well ; 
and he also played on the lute with great 
skill and taste. Whenever he spent any of 
his time in the country, he took great, plea- 
sure in husbandry. From the time of Ar- 
chimedes, as M. Leibnitz observes, there 
had been nothing done in mechanical geo- 
metry, till Galileo, who possessing an excel- 
lent judgment, and great skill in the most 
abstruse points of geometry, first extended 
the boundaries of that science, and began 
to reduce the resistance of solid bodies to 
its laws. We shall follow the example of 
Dr. Hutton, in giving a summary sketch of 
his discoveries and improvements, chiefly in 
the language of the judicious Colin Maclau- 
rin. “ He made the evidence of the Coper- 
nican system more sensible, when he shewed 
from the phases ofVenus,like to the monthly 
phases of the moon, that Venus actually re- 
volves about the sun. He proved the revo- 
lution of the sun on his axis, from his spots ; 
and thence the diurnal rotation of the earth 
became more credible. The four satellites 
that attended Jupiter, in his revolution 
about the sun, represented, in Jupiter's les- 
ser system, a just image of the great solar 
system, and rendered it more easy to con- 
ceive how the moon might attend the earth, 
as a satellite, in her annual revolution. By 
discovering hills and cavities in the moon, 
and spots in the sun constantly varying, he 
shewed that there was not so great a differ- 
ence between celestial and sublunary bodies 
as the philosophers had vainly imagined. 
“ He rendered no less service to science 
by treating, in a clear and geometrical man- 
ner, the doctrine of motion, which has been 
justly called the key of nature. The ra- 
tional part of mechanics had been so much 
neglected, that scarcely any improvement 
was made in it for almost 2000 years ; but 
Galileo has given us fully the theory of 
equable motions, and of such as are uni- 
formly accelerated or retarded, and of these 
two compounded together. He first de- 
monstrated, that the spaces described by 
heavy bodies from the beginning of their 
descent, are as the squares of the times ; 
and that a body, projected in any direction 
that is not perpendicular to the horizon, 
describes a parabola. These were the be- 
ginnings of the doctrine of the motion of 
heavy bodies, which has been since carried 
to so great a height by Sir Isaac Newton. 
In geometry, he invented the cycloid, or 
