We quote first the introduction just
referred to, in which appeal is made directly to the pope.

"I can well believe, most holy father, that certain people, when they
hear of my attributing motion to the earth in these books of mine, will
at once declare that such an opinion ought to be rejected. Now, my own
theories do not please me so much as not to consider what others may
judge of them. Accordingly, when I began to reflect upon what those
persons who accept the stability of the earth, as confirmed by the
opinion of many centuries, would say when I claimed that the earth
moves, I hesitated for a long time as to whether I should publish that
which I have written to demonstrate its motion, or whether it would not
be better to follow the example of the Pythagoreans, who used to hand
down the secrets of philosophy to their relatives and friends only in
oral form. As I well considered all this, I was almost impelled to
put the finished work wholly aside, through the scorn I had reason to
anticipate on account of the newness and apparent contrariness to reason
of my theory.

"My friends, however, dissuaded me from such a course and admonished
me that I ought to publish my book, which had lain concealed in my
possession not only nine years, but already into four times the ninth
year. Not a few other distinguished and very learned men asked me to do
the same thing, and told me that I ought not, on account of my anxiety,
to delay any longer in consecrating my work to the general service of
mathematicians.

"But your holiness will perhaps not so much wonder that I have dared to
bring the results of my night labors to the light of day, after having
taken so much care in elaborating them, but is waiting instead to hear
how it entered my mind to imagine that the earth moved, contrary to the
accepted opinion of mathematicians--nay, almost contrary to ordinary
human understanding. Therefore I will not conceal from your holiness
that what moved me to consider another way of reckoning the motions
of the heavenly bodies was nothing else than the fact that the
mathematicians do not agree with one another in their investigations. In
the first place, they are so uncertain about the motions of the sun and
moon that they cannot find out the length of a full year. In the
second place, they apply neither the same laws of cause and effect, in
determining the motions of the sun and moon and of the five planets,
nor the same proofs. Some emp