GALILEO AND HIS PORTRAIT.

To add interest and value to the present | periments made from the leaning tower number of the ECLECTIC we place a fine of Pisa, and so great was the prejudice portrait of this renowned man, upon the which was then roused against him, that page opposite to the portraits of the he quitted Pisa in 1592, and accepted the savans of Yale College, with no appre- professorship of mathematics in the Unihension that there will be any diversity versity of Padua. Galileo was converted of astronomical views, such as he encoun- to the doctrines of Copernicus by the lectered before the tribunal of the Inquisi- tures of Christian Vurstisius, but even tion in the olden time. We subjoin a after his conversion he taught the Ptobiographical sketch. lemic system in compliance with popular feeling. The reputation of Galileo was now widely extended. Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, invited him, in 1609, to resume his original situation at Pisa. Galileo accepted of the invitation on condition that he should receive the title of Philosopher to his Highness, as well as that of mathematician; and while this negotiation was going on he went to pay a visit to a friend in Venice. There he learned, by common report, that a Dutchman had given Prince Maurice an optical instrument which made distant objects appear near the observer. Anxious to know what this instrument was, he discovered the principle of it on his return to Padua, and having placed at the ends of a leaden tube two spectacle glasses, the one a

GALILEO was born at Pisa July 15, 1564. His father, who was himself a philosopher, had a family of three sons and three daughters, of which Galileo was the eldest. He was distinguished as a child by his skill in constructing toys and pieces of machinery. To these mechanical accomplishments he added a taste for music, drawing, and painting, and so great was his passion for pictures, that he was desirons of following painting as a profession. His father, however, having observed very decided indications of early genius, resolved to send him to the university to study medicine. He accordingly went to Pisa on the ninth of November, 1581, and was placed under the celebrated botanist Caesalpinus, who then filled the chair of medicine. In studying music and draw-plano-convex, and the other a plano-coning, he found it necessary to acquire some cave, the latter being nearest the eye, he knowledge of geometry, but no sooner obtained a telescope exactly the same as a had he entered upon Euclid than he con- modern opera-glass. This little instruceived a violent passion for mathematics, ment, which had a magnifying power of and devoted himself wholly to its study. only three times, he exhibited at Venice While pondering over the treatise of Ar- to crowds of the principal citizens, and he chimedes, De insidentibus in fluido, he presented one of them to the senate, who wrote an essay on the hydrostatic balance, in return gave him his professorship at which was the means, through Guido Padua for life, and raised his salary from Ubaldi, of obtaining for him the appoint- five hundred and twenty to one thousand ment of lecturer on mathematics in the florins. After having made other two University of Pisa, with a salary of only telescopes, one magnifying eight, and the sixty crowns. Galileo had even in his other thirty times, Galileo applied them eighteenth year exhibited a great antipa- to the heavens. With them he discov thy to the philosophy of Aristotle; but in ered the mountains and cavities in the the discharge of his new functions at Pisa, moon, the round disk of the planets, and he did not scruple to denounce his me- the four satellites of Jupiter. He counted chanical doctrines, and expose their errors forty stars in the Pleiades, and found that in the language even of asperity and tri- many of the nebula were clusters of small umph. On the subject of falling bodies stars. The satellites of Jupiter were dishe disproved his doctrine by actual ex-covered on the seventh January, 1610,

and they were afterwards found by our Grand Duke's ambassador. When sumcelebrated countryman, Thomas Hariot, moned before that body for his heretical on the seventeenth of October of the same doctrine, he was charged with maintainyear. In directing his telescope towards ing the stability of the sun, and the moSaturn, Galileo observed it to be like tion of the earth, and of trying to reconthree o's, namely, oOo, the middle one cile this doctrine to Scripture; and after being the largest, thus approximating to inquiring into the truth of these charges the discovery of Saturn's ring, afterwards on the twenty-fifth February, 1616, it was made by Huygens. About the same time decreed that Galileo should be enjoined he discovered the crescent of Venus, and by Cardinal Bellarmine to renounce the the spots on the sun, which were seen obnoxious tenets, and to pledge himself, about six months later by Hariot in Eng- under the pain of imprisonment, neither land. In the early part of 1611, Galileo to teach nor publish them in future. He went to Rome, and took with him his accordingly appeared before the Cardinal, best telescope. Here, princes, cardinals, and having renounced his opinions, and and prelates, hastened to do him honor, declared that he would neither teach nor and had the gratification of seeing the defend them, he was dismissed from the spots on the sun in the Quirinal gardens. bar of the Inquisition. About this time The discoveries of Galileo were ill received Galileo proposed a method of finding the by the followers of Aristotle. Prejudice longitude at sea by the eclipse of Jupiter's and ignorance were thus combined against satellites, and expected that Philip III. him, and in the controversies into which of Spain would employ him to devote his he was led, he treated his opponents and time to the perfection of a method so usetheir opinions with undue ridicule and ful to commerce. He failed, however, in sarcasm. The philosophers and free- this attempt. But the mortification which thinkers of the day, many of whom had it gave him was compensated by the elebeen Galileo's pupils, marshaled them-vation of his friend Urban VIII. to the selves on his side, while the Aristotelian pontificate. In October, 1623, Galileo sages were supported with all the influence of the Church. While these parties were resting on the defensive, Galileo, in 1613, addressed a letter to his friend, the Abbé Castelli, to prove that the Scriptures were not intended to teach us science and philosophy, and that it was equally difficult to reconcile the Ptolemic and the Copernican system with expressions in the Bible. In replying to this letter, Caccini, a Dominican monk, made a personal attack upon Galileo from the pulpit, ridiculing the astronomer and his followers. Roused by this attack, Galileo published a long letter defending his former views, which he dedicated to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Its reasoning was conclusive, and its influence powerful. It was felt to be hopeless to meet his arguments by any other weapons than those of the civil power, and with the resolution to crush the dangerous innovation, his enemies determined upon appealing to the Inquisition. A Dominican monk had paved the way for such a process by denouncing to that body Galileo's letter to Castelli, and Caccini was induced to settle at Rome, in order to embody the evidence against his opponent. In the year 1617, Galileo went to Rome, cited probably by the Inquisition, and was lodged in the palace of the

went to Rome to offer his congratulations to his holiness. The Pope loaded him with presents, promised him a pension for his son, and on the death of Cosmo, remended him in a special letter to the new Grand Duke of Tuscany. The cardinals even were propitiated, and in the same spirit his friend Castelli was made mathematician to the Pope. Notwithstanding these acts of kindness, however, Galileo cherished the deepest hostility against the Church, and his resolution to propagate his opinions seems to have been coeval with the vow by which he renounced them. He resolved to write a work in which the Copernican system should be demonstrated. This work, entitled The System of the World, by Galileo Galilei, was published in 1626, and consists of four dialogues, in which he discusses the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems. The work is dedicated to Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and contains an ironical and insulting attack upon the decree of the Inquisition. The doctrines which it defended were so widely disseminated, and so eagerly received, that the Church of Rome felt the blow which was thus given to its intellectual supremacy. Under these circumstances the Pope did not hesitate in his resolution to punish its

ever the hostility which threatened to overwhelm him. The philosopher, however, was supported only by philosophy, and in the love of truth he found a miser

Galileo cowered under the fear of man, and his submission was the salvation of the Church. The sword of the Inquisition descended on his prostrate neck, and though its stroke was not physical, yet it fell with a moral influence, fatal to the character of its victim, and to the dignity of science." From the prison of the Inquisition, where he remained only four days, Galileo was allowed to go to the house of the Tuscan ambassador, and after six months' residence there, to pass the term of imprisonment in his own house at Arcetri. The happiness of rejoining his family, however, was of short duration. His favorite daughter was seized with an illness of which she died; and having himself fallen into a state of ill-health, he was permitted to go to Florence for its recovery in 1638. Here he was debarred from all intercourse with society, and it was only in the presence of an officer of the inquisition that his friend Castelli was permitted to visit him. During his five years' confinement he composed his Dialogues on Local Motion, and in 1636 he discovered the interesting phenomena of the moon's libration. About this time he lost the use of both his eyes, when he was negotiating with the Dutch government respecting his method of finding the longitude. At a somewhat later period almost total deafness supervened, and having been attacked with fever and palpitation of the heart, he died on the eighth January, 1642, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. He was buried in the church of Sta Croce in Florence, and a splendid monument erected to his memory in 1737.*

author. Galileo was accordingly summoned before the Inquisition. Worn out with age and infirmities, he arrived in Rome on the fourteenth February, 1633, and on the advice of his friends he re-able substitute for the hopes of the martyr. mained in strict seclusion in the house of the Tuscan ambassador. Early in April, when his examination in person took place, he was removed to the holy office, and lodged in the house of the fiscal of the Inquisition, his table being provided by the Tuscan ambassador. It is stated by M. Libri, and generally believed, that in his examination he was put to the torture, and after this had taken place, he was allowed a reasonable time for his defense. Having duly considered his confession and excuses, he was again summoned to the holy office. On the twenty-second of June he was conducted in a penitential dress to the convent of Minerva, sentence of imprisonment during the pleasure of the Inquisition was pronounced upon him, and he was ordered to abjure and curse the heresies he had cherished. "The account of the trial and sentence of Galileo," says Sir David Brewster, "is pregnant with the deepest interest and instruction. Human nature is here drawn in its darkest coloring; and in surveying the melancholy picture, it is difficult to decide whether religion or philosophy has been most degraded. But what excuse can we devise for the humiliating abjuration of Galileo? Why did this master spirit of the agethis high-priest of the stars-this representative of science. this hoary sage, whose career of glory was near its consummation-why did he reject the crown of martyrdom which he had himself created, and which, plaited with immortal laurels, was about to descend upon his head? If instead of disavowing the laws of nature, and surrendering in his own person the intellectual dignity of his species, he had boldly asserted the truth of his opinions, and confided his character to posterity, and his cause to an all-ruling Providence, he would have strung up the hair-suspended saber, and disarmed for

structed and used in his astronomical discoveries are still preserved as objects of interest, which we have seen at Florence.-En.

*The identical instruments which Galileo con

COMMENCEMENT DAY. YALE COLLEGE, 1860.

fessional life. Here crowded assemblies of the good and beautiful of the land, have annually been convened to witness these interesting and instructive ceremo nies. Thousands of the sons of the Yale College family have returned, and love to return after long years of absence, for mutual recognitions and friendly greetings, in these scenes of college life. This pulpit has thus become an historic locality, environed with countless reminiscences which nestle in the hearts of the alumni over all the land. No where else, scarcely, are there such annual gatherings of talent, and character, and influence, such as come up here from all parts of our great Confederacy.

THIS is the title of the plate of portraits which embellishes our present number. Some explanation of its design may be of interest to the reader. The scene is laid in the Center Church, at New-Haven, where Rev. Dr. Bacon has filled the pastorate for thirty-five years. The occasion is the annual commencement of Yale College, July 26th, 1860. The position of the portraits is in the pulpit, with a representation of columns behind. Here President Day sat and presided, anunally on commencement-day for twenty-nine years, and conferred the college degrees upon twenty-nine generations or classes of graduating students, many of whom now fill important stations of honor and trust in all parts of the land. Here President Woolsey has annually sat for a similar purpose for fourteen years, and conferred degrees upon fourteen generations of students. With few exceptions Professor Silliman has been annually present on these occasions for more than a half century, sitting in near proximity to the position where he now appears. From the stage in front of this pulpit more than forty generations of students have uttered their valedictories in words or actions taken leave of college scenes to enter on the battle-conflicts of practical and pro-a look at the plate.

Our design in the character of this plate is obvious. We desired, as far as possible, to photograph the scene and the occasion-to preserve a perpetual remembrance, alike of the place, the scene, and the almost life-portraits of the eminent men who have presided there for so many years, the observed of all observers. For this purpose we went with Mr. Sartain to New-Haven, who sketched the pulpit on the spot, and personally directed in the execution of the ambrotypes from life, and the gratifying result may be seen by

REV. JEREMIAH DAY, D.D., LL.D.

AN expressive portrait of this venerable and venerated man adorns the present number of the ECLECTIC. He is now advancing in the eighty-eighth year of his long and useful life. His example has illuminated the path he trod through these revolving years. His declining sun, now far down in life's evening, is serene

and without clouds, betokening a bright and glorious morn. Many, we doubt not, of the surviving members of the twentynine college generations, or classes, which graduated under his presidency, will look upon these well- remembered features though deeply marked with the tracery of time's fingers, with respect and affec