Another opponent of Galileo deserves to be named, were it only for the singular impudence of the charge he ventures to bring against him. "We are not to think," says Christmann, in the Appendix to his _Nodus Gordius_, "that Jupiter has four satellites given him by nature, in order, by revolving round him, to immortalize the name of the Medici, who first had notice of the observation. These are the dreams of _idle men_, who love ludicrous ideas better than our laborious and industrious correction of the heavens.--Nature abhors so horrible a chaos, and to the truly wise such vanity is detestable."
Galileo was also urged by the astrologers to attribute some influence, according to their fantastic notions, to the satellites, and the account which he gives his friend Dini of his answer to one of this class is well worth extracting, as a specimen of his method of uniting sarcasm with serious expostulation; "I must," says he, "tell you what I said a few days back to one of those nativity-casters, who believe that God, when he created the heavens and the stars, had no thoughts beyond what they can themselves conceive, in order to free myself from his tedious importunity; for he protested, that unless I would declare to him the effect of the Medicæan planets, he would reject and deny them as needless and superfluous. I believe this set of men to be of Sizzi's opinion, that astronomers discovered the other seven planets, not by seeing them corporally in the skies, but only from their effects on earth,--much in the manner in which some houses are discovered to be haunted by evil spirits, not by seeing them, but from the extravagant pranks which are played there. I replied, that he ought to reconsider the hundred or thousand opinions which, in the course of his life, he might have given, and particularly to examine well the events which he had predicted with the help of Jupiter, and if he should find that all had succeeded conformably to his predictions, I bid him prophecy merrily on, according to his old and wonted rules; for I assured him that the new planets would not in any degree affect the things which are already past, and that in future he would not be a less fortunate conjuror than he had been: but if, on the contrary, he should find the events depending on Jupiter, in some trifling particulars not to have agreed with his dogmas and prognosticating aphorisms, he ought to set to work to find new tables for calculating the constitution of the four Jovial circulators at every bygone moment, and, perhaps, from the diversity of their aspects, he would be able, with accurate observations and multiplied conjunctions, to discover the alterations and variety of influences depending upon them; and I reminded him, that in ages past they had not acquired knowledge with little labour, at the expense of others, from written books, but that the first inventors acquired the most excellent knowledge of things natural and divine with study and contemplation of the vast book which nature holds ever open before those who have eyes in their forehead and in their brain; and that it was a more honourable and praiseworthy enterprize with their own watching, toil, and study, to discover something admirable and new among the infinite number which yet remain concealed in the darkest depths of philosophy, than to pass a listless and lazy existence, labouring only to darken the toilsome inventions of their neighbours, in order to excuse their own cowardice and inaptitude for reasoning, while they cry out that nothing can be added to the discoveries already made."