ced such astonishing
changes that we are fain to boast that we have entered upon the most
fortunate and triumphant epoch in our world's history.

Many men might be taken as the representatives of this new era of
science and material inventions, but I select Galileo Galilei as one of
the most interesting in his life, opinions, and conflicts.

Galileo was born at Pisa, in the year 1564, the year that Calvin and
Michael Angelo died, four years after the birth of Bacon, in the sixth
year of the reign of Elizabeth, and the fourth of Charles IX., about the
time when the Huguenot persecution was at its height, and the Spanish
monarchy was in its most prosperous state, under Philip II. His parents
were of a noble but impoverished Florentine family; and his father, who
was a man of some learning,--a writer on the science of music,--gave him
the best education he could afford. Like so many of the most illustrious
men, he early gave promise of rare abilities. It was while he was a
student in the university of his native city that his attention was
arrested by the vibrations of a lamp suspended from the ceiling of the
cathedral; and before he had quitted the church, while the choir was
chanting mediaeval anthems, he had compared those vibrations with his
own pulse, which after repeated experiments, ended in the construction
of the first pendulum,--applied not as it was by Huygens to the
measurement of time, but to medical science, to enable physicians to
ascertain the rate of the pulse. But the pendulum was soon brought into
the service of the clockmakers, and ultimately to the determination of
the form of the earth, by its minute irregularities in diverse
latitudes, and finally to the measurement of differences of longitude by
its connection with electricity and the recording of astronomical
observations. Thus it was that the swinging of a cathedral lamp, before
the eye of a man of genius, has done nearly as much as the telescope
itself to advance science, to say nothing of its practical uses in
common life.

Galileo had been destined by his father to the profession of medicine,
and was ignorant of mathematics. He amused his leisure hours with
painting and music, and in order to study the principles of drawing he
found it necessary to acquire some knowledge of geometry, much to the
annoyance of his father, who did not like to see his mind diverted from
the prescriptions of Hippocrates and Galen. The certain truths of
geometry b