fear of the Inquisition, were destroyed, or concealed and lost, after
the author's death.

In the same year, 1609, Galileo heard the report that a spectacle-maker
of Middleburg, in Holland, had made an instrument by which distant
objects appeared nearer. He tasked his ingenuity to discover the
construction, and soon succeeded in manufacturing a telescope. His
telescope, however, seems to have been made on a different construction
from that of the Dutch optician. It consisted of a convex and concave
glass, distant from each other by the difference of their focal lengths,
like a modern opera-glass; while there is reason to believe that the
other was made up of two convex lenses, distant by the sum of their
focal lengths, the common construction of the astronomical telescope.
Galileo's attention naturally was first turned to the moon. He
discovered that her surface, instead of being smooth and perfectly
spherical, was rough with mountains and apparently varied like the
earth, by land and water. He next applied to Jupiter, and was struck by
the appearance of three small stars, almost in a straight line and close
to him. At first he did not suspect the nature of these bodies; but
careful observation soon convinced him that these three, together with a
fourth, which was at first invisible, were in reality four moons
revolving round their primary planet. These he named the Medicean stars.
They have long ceased to be known by that name; but so highly prized was
the distinction thus conferred upon the ducal house of Florence, that
Galileo received an intimation that he would "do a thing just and proper
in itself, and at the same time render himself and his family rich and
powerful forever," if he "named the next star which he should discover
after the name of the great star of France, as well as the most
brilliant of all the earth," Henry IV. These discoveries were made known
in 1610, in a work entitled "Nuncius Sidereus," the Newsman of the
Stars; in which Galileo further announced that he had seen many stars
invisible to the naked eye, and ascertained that the nebulae scattered
through the heavens consist of assemblages of innumerable small stars.
The ignorant and unprejudiced were struck with admiration; indeed,
curiosity had been raised so high before the publication of this book,
as materially to interfere with the convenience of those who possessed
telescopes. Galileo was employed a month in exhibiting his own to the
pri