can think of his mock recantation of the doctrines of the earth's axical and orbital motion without feelings of deep shame and regret? -an old man, at the age of seventy, on his knees, with his right hand resting on the Gospels, renouncing opinions of the truth of which he had not the slightest doubt, and ecclesiastical authority exacting the sacrifice with the temporal sword. But in judging of the actions of men we should always take into account the circumstances of temptation in which they have been placed, the general current of opinion in their day, and a due sense of human infirmity. Such was the state of public feeling in Italy, that it is more than probable that Galileo regarded the service imposed upon him as a church ceremony, through which, as a son of the church, he was bound to go, without being responsible for its demerits. The sorrows that accompanied his descent to the grave, the indomitable energy which he displayed under them, together with his achievements, may be accepted as a reason for moderating censure upon his one failure in the time of trial. He lost his favourite daughter, Maria, in his old age the charm and comfort of his life. The sight he had so well employed failed him, and he became totally blind. In sickness, his petition to repair to Florence for medical assistance was denied. He afterwards lost his hearing; but his intellectual powers remained strong and active until his death in 1642, wanting a year to the birth of Newton, and to the lapse of a century from the death of Copernicus. Galileo was lax in his morals, like the rest of his countrymen, fond of society, of cheerful spirit, and highly popular manners. He was strongly attached to a country life, attended to agriculture, and spent much of his leisure among his vines. But for years he was a martyr to acute bodily pain. His house is still standing at Arcetri, about a mile from Florence, near St. Matthew's convent. His last surviving pupil, Viviani, became a fellow of our Royal Society, and lived to enter the eighteenth century.

The remains of Galileo were interred in unconsecrated ground in the front of the noble church of Santa Croce in Florence. They have since been removed into the interior of the building, and laid in the centre aisle. His monument stands opposite the tombs of Dante, Alfieri, and Michael Angelo, and consists of a bust, said to be a portrait. A finger stolen from the coffin when the body was removed is now in the Laurentian Library, enclosed in a glass case, and placed in considerable state upon a pedestal. Galileo is thus apostrophised by the American Minister in this country, Mr. Everett, in some lines written after visiting Santa Croce :

And thou, illustrious sage! thine eye is clos'd,
To which their secret paths new stars expos'd.
Haply thy spirit in some higher sphere
Soars with the motions which it measur'd here.
Dost thou, whose keen perception pierc'd the cause
Which gives the pendulum its mystic laws,
Now trace each orb with telescopic eyes,
And solve the eternal clock-work of the skies?
While thy worn frame enjoys its long repose,
And Santa Croce heals Arcetri's woes."

There is no reason to doubt the perfect sincerity of the theologians of the church of Rome in their proceedings against Galileo, and strong mitigating circumstances might be cited on their behalf. They believed his scientific conclusions to be contrary to the sense of Scripture, and hence acted under an honest conviction that they could not be true. Nor were they alone in this opinion, having the authority of all the early fathers on their side, and that of many Protestant interpreters. But as a book designed for popular use, the Bible is adapted for popular comprehension; and hence its representations are framed in wise and benign accommodation to the understanding in ordinary life. The appearance presented by physical nature to the eye of the observer is expressed, and not the

philosophical fact· —a style still in vogue, which shows its propriety, for we never speak of the globe rotating in common speech, but of the sun rising and setting; and we are guilty of no false philosophy in popularly assigning fixidity to the earth, and speaking of its repose. Yet, overlooking the plain design and popular style of Scripture-rigidly construing the latter—the theologians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in great numbers, regarded the sacred record as teaching the sun's daily apparent procession through the heavens, and the earth's stability, as physical facts, and hence denounced the Copernicans as heretics in religion, and deluded in philosophy. The controversy that ensued deserves attention, because, in a precisely similar way in our own times, the Scriptures have been arrayed against geology. The termination of the former contest should have been a monitory example to some modern exponents of holy writ, not to assume their expositions to be right and the geologists wrong, but to admit the possibility of being fallible interpreters themselves.

Before the death of Galileo the telescope had been adapted to instruments for measuring angular distances. A countryman of our own, of the name of Gascoyne, who became a soldier in the civil war, and was slain while yet a youth in the battle of Marston Moor, is the first person recorded as having applied the telescope to the quadrant. This improvement in the art of observing perished with him, and was not known again in practice until a quarter of a century afterwards, when it appeared in France as a new invention. The same ingenious and unfortunate individual was the first constructor of the micrometer, by which the diameters of celestial objects are taken; and this likewise remained unknown, to be re-discovered at the commencement of the eighteenth century. Practical astronomy also received one of its most beautiful and important acquisitions soon after the telescope, in the application of the pendulum to clocks, affording a more exact method of measuring time. This was followed by the invention of the transit instrument, used in determining declination and right ascension, or the distances of the stars and any celestial phenomenon from certain fixed points in the heavens—a problem analogous to that of terrestrial latitude and longitude. The former was the work of Huygens, a Hollander, the latter of Roemer, a Dane-two invaluable contributions to the furniture of the observatory. But the "optic glass" of the "Tuscan artist" is the chief glory of the seventeenth century among mechanical constructions as the germ of those mighty tubes which, at Greenwich, Dorpat, and Paramatta, now search the profundities of space- utterly insignificant, indeed, when compared with them, as much so as the seedling to the tree which a thousand years has braved the breeze, yet still the germ! A cylinder of lead, a few inches long, with two spectacle-glasses at its extremities, one convex, and the other concave the plaything of a child was the original telescope; yet, even in the day of its feebleness, it was sufficiently strong to break down the barrier which had arrested the knowledge of all antiquity, and manifest to the gaze of man what had successfully defied his glance for ages-the lunar steppes, highlands, and ravines-Venus in phase-Jupiter surrounded with his servitors—and Saturn's strange and then inexplicable structure. The fate of the wandering Merope, the name of the lost Pleiad, has given rise to many elegant fictions. The fact, however, appears to be, that, according to the power of vision possessed by individuals, six, seven, or even more stars are discerned in the cluster. But the telescope multiplies the Pleiads into several hundreds. There are six stars in the neck of the bull visible to the naked eye, forming the cluster of the Pleiades. The ancients speak of seven, and, according to their fable, they were the seven daughters of king Atlas, translated to the skies on account of their virtues, one losing her elevation for a mortal's love.

HERE is no great operation of which we are cognizant, by which Nature at a single bound perfects her marvellous productions. It is only by a combination of instruments operating generally through a series of years. The ultimate result is reached by a progressive advance, to which a number of artificers contribute. The cedar, on whose boughs the snow rests and the fowls nestle, is the work of centuries; and the soil that laps its roots, the air that stirs its branches, the light that plays upon its crest, and the rain that drops upon its foliage, minister to the final development of the original cone. In like manner, the social and political changes that have improved the tone of society, elevated the condition of nations, and endowed them with an enduring liberty, have not been accomplished in the twinkling of an eye, or by individual intelligence and will. Popular history may embalm the name of some distinguished patriot or philanthropist, as having been the agent in rescuing a country from the yoke of arbitrary power, or breaking the bonds of personal slavery, and it may record a crisis of revolution confined within the limits of a year or a day; but a comprehensive view of such occurrences will embrace a time of preparation, and crown with honour a variety of labourers, though to one may be due the glory of the sun, and to another the glory of the stars. The signature of the edict that dethroned the heathenism of the ancient civilised world occupied the imperial hand a moment's space, but the work of apostles, martyrs, and confessors, with the toils and sufferings of ages, are prominent in the picture. So the great demonstrations and achievements of science have transpired by slow degrees, and yield a distinction to be divided among a fellowship of kindred spirits, rather than assigned exclusively to a solitary example of mental prowess. If Keppler discovered the general laws of the universe, the basis of the discovery was laid by Tycho; and the marvellous Napier contributed essentially to the issue obtained, by the invention of the logarithms, an admirable artifice, as it has been justly called, which, by reducing to a few days the labour of many months, doubles the life of the astronomer, and saves him the errors and disgust con

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nected with long calculations. If Newton developed the cause of those laws, he started to his grand result from a point expressly prepared by Keppler, and left the solution of the problem imperfect for Laplace to finish. It is obviously in wise accordance with the happiness of mankind, that no nation possesses a monopoly of talent and fame, that many of the most remarkable efforts of human genius owe a debt of obligation to the accomplishments of genius at another era, and in a different clime. The fact proclaims the affinity of the species, between whom the mighty deep may roll, or the mountain rampart rise. It evinces too their mutual dependence, and will be hailed as a motive by the considerate mind, to the maintenance of universal amity.

We have seen four of the European nations represented in the advance of astronomical science-Poland by Copernicus, Denmark by Tycho, Germany by Keppler, and Italy by Galileo. The procession had been joined by Holland, France, and England, before the middle of the seventeenth century; but it will be impracticable to record the labours, or even mention the names, of those who were then employed in the investigation of celestial phenomena. The selection of a few of the most distinguished is imperative. To Hevelius, one of the merchant princes of Dantzic, an example of the close alliance of commerce with the fine arts and science which runs through the page of history, we owe the first accurate delineation of the lunar surface, the discovery of a libration in longitude; by his observation of the comet of 1664, he further corroborated the view previously taken, that such bodies are not sublunary, and approximated to the nature of their orbits. His contemporary Huygens, after effecting various improvements in the telescope, discovered one of the satellites of Saturn, that which is now termed the fourth, and obtained an insight into the singular structure of the planet, an inexplicable appearance to all preceding observers. An anagram, in the year 1656, announced to the world the following sentence by a transposition of letters, annulo cingitur, tenui, plano, nusquam cohærenta, ad eclipticam, inclinatio, the planet is surrounded with a ring, thin, plane, nowhere adhering, and inclined to the ecliptic. He justly observes, in a letter to his brother: "If any one shall gravely tell me that I have spent my time idly in a vain and fruitless inquiry, after what I can never become sure of; the answer is, that at this rate, he would put down all natural philosophy, as far as it concerns itself in searching into the nature of things. In such noble and sublime studies as these, it is a glory to arrive at probability, and the search itself rewards the pains. But besides the nobleness and pleasure of the studies, may we not be so bold as to say, they are no small help to the advancement of wisdom and morality?" The discovery of the great nebula in Orion was accidentally made by Huygens in the year 1656. Cassini, nurtured in France, soon afterwards added four more satellites to the system of Saturn, those now called the first, second, third, and fifth, and he detected the black list, or dark elliptical line bisecting the surface of the ring, and dividing it into two. Astronomy is under immense obligations to a measure adopted by the courts of France and England at nearly the same period, for the patronage of scientific associations, and the founding of national observatories. The Royal Society of London was incorporated by charter in the year 1662, and numbered among its early members Boyle, Hooke, Wallis, Ward, Newton, and Flamstead. The Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris was founded in the year 1666, and enrolled among its first members Auzout, Picard, Roberval, and Richer. Upon the invitation of Louis XIV. Huygens left Holland to become a royal academician, but being a Protestant, the revocation of the edict of Nantes ultimately compelled him to return to his native soil. The edict did not effect Cassini, a Catholic foreigner similarly invited; and to him, with his son and grandson, the French academy owes much of its early distinction. Besides his before-named discoveries, he determined the periods of rotation of the principal planets, and observed the elliptical form of Jupiter's disc owing to compression at the poles.

Roëmer, the inventor of the transit instrument with which he made observations from the window of his house, rendered no unimportant service by showing that the instruments need not be fixed on high towers: he also discovered, in the year 1675, the interesting and hitherto unsuspected fact, of the progressive transmission of light through space, and the appreciable velocity with which it travels. This was attained by a series of careful observations of the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites. It was found, by comparing the times of immersion of the satellites in the planet's shadow and emersion from it, with the times calculated from the laws of their movements, that there was an acceleration or retardation of the phenomena by a few minutes, plainly dependent upon the variations of the earth's distance from Jupiter; for the retardation was observed to be the greatest when the earth was in that part of its orbit most remote from him. The diameter of the orbit of the earth being a hundred and ninety millions of miles, we are more remote from Jupiter, by the whole of that distance, at one time than at another; as, when the earth is in its orbit at a, its distance is greater from J than when at b by the interval between the two points. But notwithstanding this immense addition of space, or any conceivable increase, an eclipse would be observed to occur no later at the one than at the other, if light were propagated instantaneously. Roëmer found, however, a difference of eleven minutes to exist, which he afterwards estimated at fourteen, but which the precision of modern astronomy has fixed at sixteen minutes and a quarter. This determines the progressive motion of light, and the rate of its velocity. It requires time for its transmission; and flying over the diameter of the earth's orbit in sixteen and a quarter minutes gives it a velocity of twelve millions of miles a minute, or upwards of a hundred and ninety thousand miles a second. Thus, in the eighth part of a second, it accomplishes the passage of a space equal to the equatorial circumference of our globe: yet so vast is the system to which we belong, that this swift-winged messenger, which requires no more than two hours to travel from the central sun to the farthest planet, could not dart through the intervening solitudes between us and the nearest of the stars under a period of five years. Notwithstanding the velocity of the rays of light, which travel more than fifteen hundred thousand times faster than a cannon ball, experiment has not yet been able to detect that they have any impulsive power. The surmise has, however, been thrown out and it is not improbable — that the attrition of the solar beams with the terrestrial surface may have some connexion with the phenomena of heat.

The national observatory of England-the noblest institution in the world for the extent and exactitude of its astronomical tables, and their practical value in the art of navigation was originated by the spread of foreign commerce. The growth of our colonies across the Atlantic, together with the establishment of our relations with India, rendered it of the first importance to have an easy and accurate method of finding the longitude at sea. A plan was proposed, founded upon the principle now in use, of observing the lunar motions and distances during a voyage, and comparing them with a previous home calculation, thus ascertaining the difference between home time and time at sea, from whence the difference of longitude is readily deduced. A reward being sought by the proposer from the government of Charles II., it was referred to a commission to report upon the merits of the scheme. Flamstead, one of the commissioners, at once decided against its practical utility, on the ground of the inaccuracy both of the lunar tables and of the positions of the stars in existing catalogues, which only a lengthened course of observation could rectify. The king, declaring that his pilots and sailors