adjourn to a hall holding one thousand persons. At the next he had to
lecture in the open air. He took occasion to rebuke his hearers for
thronging to hear about an ephemeral novelty, while for the much more
wonderful and important truths about the permanent stars and facts of
nature they had but deaf ears.

But the main point he brought out concerning the new star was that it
upset the received Aristotelian doctrine of the immutability of the
heavens. According to that doctrine the heavens were unchangeable,
perfect, subject neither to growth nor to decay. Here was a body, not a
meteor but a real distant star, which had not been visible and which
would shortly fade away again, but which meanwhile was brighter than
Jupiter.

The staff of petrified professorial wisdom were annoyed at the
appearance of the star, still more at Galileo's calling public attention
to it; and controversy began at Padua. However, he accepted it, and now
boldly threw down the gauntlet in favor of the Copernican theory,
utterly repudiating the old Ptolemaic system, which up to that time he
had taught in the schools according to established custom.

The earth no longer the only world to which all else in the firmament
were obsequious attendants, but a mere insignificant speck among the
host of heaven! Man no longer the centre and cynosure of creation, but,
as it were, an insect crawling on the surface of this little speck! All
this not set down in crabbed Latin in dry folios for a few learned
monks, as in Copernicus' time, but promulgated and argued in rich
Italian, illustrated by analogy, by experiment, and with cultured wit;
taught not to a few scholars here and there in musty libraries, but
proclaimed in the vernacular to the whole populace with all the energy
and enthusiasm of a recent convert and a master of language! Had a
bombshell been exploded among the fossilized professors it had been less
disturbing.

But there was worse in store for them. A Dutch optician, Hans Lippershey
by name, of Middleburg, had in his shop a curious toy, rigged up, it is
said, by an apprentice, and made out of a couple of spectacle lenses,
whereby, if one looked through it, the weather-cock of a neighboring
church spire was seen nearer and upside down. The tale goes that the
Marquis Spinola, happening to call at the shop, was struck with the toy
and bought it. He showed it to Prince Maurice of Nassau, who thought of
using it for military reconnoitring. All