st be a consolation for others who are struggling
to have ideas of theirs adopted, to read the words addressed to his
great contemporary and sympathetic fellow worker by the Italian
astronomer.

"What wilt thou say," he writes, "of the first teachers at the
University at Padua, who when I offered to them the opportunity,
would look neither at the planets nor the moon through the
telescope? This sort of men look on philosophy as a book like the
AEneid or Odyssey, and believe the truth is to be sought not in the
world of nature, but only in comparison of texts. How wouldst thou
have laughed, when at Pisa the leading Professor of the University
there endeavored, in the presence of the Grand Duke, to tear away
the new planets from Heaven with logical arguments, like magical
exorcisms!"

This gives the key to the real explanation of the Galileo incident
better than would a whole volume of explanation of it. It is now
realized that very few of those who have been most ready to quote the
example of Galileo's condemnation as an argument for Church
intolerance in the matter of science, know anything at all about the
details of his case. The bitter intolerance of many men of science of
his time, including even that supposed apostle of the experimental
method--Bacon--to the Copernican system, is an important but ignored
phase of the case of Galileo, as it came before the Roman inquisition.
The peculiar position occupied by Galileo caused Prof. Huxley, writing
to Prof. St. George Mivart, November 12th, 1885, to say that, after
looking into the case of Galileo when he was in Italy, he had arrived
at the conclusion "that the Pope and the College of Cardinals had
rather the best of it." In our own time, M. Bertrand, the Perpetual
Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, declared that "the great
lesson for those who would wish to oppose reason with violence was
clearly to be read in Galileo's story, and the scandal of his
condemnation was learned _without any profound sorrow to Galileo
himself; and his long life, considered as a whole, must be looked upon
as the most serene and enviable in the history of science."_

{395}

Certain historical incidents in which Church authorities and
ecclesiastics assumed an attitude distinctly opposed to true
scientific advance can be found. They are, however, ever so much rarer
than is thought. Let those who accept unquestioningly the supposed
opposition of Church to scie