er still. Galileo set to work timing and measuring these
oscillations, and he found that they were always done in exact measure
and in perfect rhythm. This led, some years later, to perfecting an
astronomical clock for measuring movements of the stars. And from this
was originated the pendulum-clock, where before we had depended on
sundials.

The endeavor of Galileo's parents had been to keep him ignorant of
mathematics and practical life, that he might blossom forth as a saint
who would sing and play and make pictures like those of Leonardo, and
carve statues like Michelangelo, only better.

But parents plan, and Fate disposes.

In Fifteen Hundred Eighty-three, Ostilio Ricci, the famous
mathematician, chanced to be in Pisa, on his way from Rome to Milan, and
gave a lecture at the Court, on Geometry.

Galileo was not interested in the theme, but he was in the speaker, and
so he attended the lecture.

This action proved one of the pivotal points in his life.

"Whether other people really teach us anything, is a question," says
Stanley Hall; "but they do sometimes give us impulses, and make us find
out for ourselves."

Ricci made Galileo find out for himself.

He turned to Archimedes from Plato. Geometry became a passion, and a
very wise man has told us that we never accomplish anything, either good
or bad, without passion. Passion means one hundred pounds of steam on
the boiler, with love sitting on the safety-valve, when the blow-off is
set for fifty.

It surely is risky business, I will admit; accidents will occur
occasionally and explosions sometimes happen, but everything is risky,
even life, since few get out of it alive.

And so, to drop back to the original proposition, nothing great and
sublime is ever done without passion.

Galileo had his mechanical whooping-cough, musical mumps, artistic
measles, and now the hectic flush of mathematics burned on his cheeks.
He talked and dreamed mathematics.

Euclid was in the saddle.

Ricci became interested in the talented young scholar and remained
longer at Pisa than he had intended, that they might sit up all night
and surprise the rising sun, discussing beauties of dimensions and the
wonders of dynamics.

Together they went to Florence, where Ricci introduced his pupil as a
pedagogic sample of the goods, just as Booker Washington usually takes
with him on his travels a few ebony homo bricks as his specimens from
Tuskegee.

The beauty and the grace of