Our work was too far advanced to be given up, and so we went on, in the hope that even now there might be some little place in the world for it. By the time Epinois’s book reached us the copying was finished, and we were correcting the proofs by the originals. It was not without value, even for our enterprise, for we compared our proofs with it line by line and word by word, made notes of deviations, and then went to the Vatican to see which was right. We readily acknowledge that in this way we discovered and corrected many errors which had crept into our copy. The variations which still exist are all well known to us, and are left, either because Epinois is mistaken, or we consider our reading to be the best. This is not the place for a criticism of his work; we will only bear witness, after comparing it with the original, to its accuracy.
The Acts of the two trials of Galileo, of 1615-16 and 1632-33, which are stitched together, and to which several other documents are added relating to the surveillance of Galileo until his death, and the erection of his monument, form a pretty thick quarto volume, twenty-two centimeters broad and thirty high.
It is done up in a loose sheet of white paper, which can lay no claim to veneration from age, and is in an equally loose green pasteboard cover, which may boast of historic antiquity, as may also the faded and frail red strings by which the volume is fastened. The cover is too short and too narrow, so that the edges get mercilessly rubbed. In this way, unfortunately, many a letter, word and even signature in these precious papers have been lost, and it is high time to protect them from further injury.
The documents are only slightly fastened together in places, and you can see from the outside how far the Acts of the first trial extend. This slight fastening also enables you to see that all the blank pages, of which there are 194, are partly reverse sides, partly second pages of documents, and it may easily be discovered to which document each blank page belongs. In some cases these second pages have been cut away, as appears from the broad piece left. The suspicion from this that important documents have been withdrawn seems inadmissible, for the pages cut out, as is seen from those left, which correspond with the rest, belonged to finished documents, and the abstraction of a document would certainly not have been betrayed by leaving a broad strip behind.