[74] Ce philosophe (Galilée) ne fut point persecuté comme bon astronome, mais comme mauvais théologien. C'est son entêtement à vouloir concilier la Bible avec Copernic qui lui donna des juges. Mais vingt auteurs, surtout parmi les protestans, ont écrit que Galilée fut persecuté et imprisonné pour avoir soutenu que la terre tourne autour du soleil, que ce système a été condanné par l'inquisition comme faux, erroné et contraire à la Bible, &c.--Bergier, Encyclopédie Méthodique, Paris, 1790, Art. SCIENCES HUMAINES.
[75] Viri Galilæi, quid statis adspicientes in coelum. _Acts_ I. 11.
[76] Tractatus Syllepticus. Romæ, 1633. The title-page of this remarkable production is decorated with an emblematical figure, representing the earth included in a triangle; and in the three corners, grasping the globe with their fore feet, are placed three bees, the arms of Pope Urban VIII. who condemned Galileo and his writings. The motto is "_His fixa quiescit_," "Fixed by these it is at rest."
_Controversy on Comets--Saggiatore--Galileo's reception by Urban VIII--His family._
THE year 1618 was remarkable for the appearance of three comets, on which almost every astronomer in Europe found something to say and write. Galileo published some of his opinions with respect to them, through the medium of Mario Guiducci. This astronomer delivered a lecture before the Florentine academy, the heads of which he was supposed to have received from Galileo, who, during the whole time of the appearance of these comets, was confined to his bed by severe illness. This essay was printed in Florence _at the sign of The Medicean Stars_.[77] What principally deserves notice in it, is the opinion of Galileo, that the distance of a comet cannot be safely determined by its parallax, from which we learn that he inclined to believe that comets are nothing but meteors occasionally appearing in the atmosphere, like rainbows, parhelia, and similar phenomena. He points out the difference in this respect between a fixed object, the distance of which may be calculated from the difference of direction in which two observers (at a known distance from each other) are obliged to turn themselves in order to see it, and meteors like the rainbow, which are simultaneously formed in different drops of water for each spectator, so that two observers in different places are in fact contemplating different objects. He then warns astronomers not to engage with too much warmth in a discussion on the distance of comets before they assure themselves to which of these two classes of phenomena they are to be referred. The remark is in itself perfectly just, although the opinion which occasioned it is now as certainly known to be erroneous, but it is questionable whether the observations which, up to that time, had been made upon comets, were sufficient, either in number or quality, to justify the censure which has been cast on Galileo for his opinion. The theory, moreover, is merely introduced as an hypothesis in Guiducci's essay. The same opinion was for a short time embraced by Cassini, a celebrated Italian astronomer, invited by Louis XIV. to the Observatory at Paris, when the science was considerably more advanced, and Newton, in his _Principia_, did not think it unworthy of him to show on what grounds it is untenable.