chiefly at home, where he continued to read and to think on scientific subjects. In the year 1586 he wrote his first known scientific essay,[1] which was circulated in manuscript, and only printed during the present century.
116. In 1589 he was appointed for three years to a professorship of mathematics (including astronomy) at Pisa. A miserable stipend, equivalent to about five shillings a week, was attached to the post, but this he was to some extent able to supplement by taking private pupils.
In his new position Galilei had scope for his remarkable power of exposition, but far from being content with giving lectures on traditional lines he also carried out a series of scientific investigations, important both in themselves and on account of the novelty in the method of investigation employed.
It will be convenient to discuss more fully at the end of this chapter Galilei's contributions to mechanics and to scientific method, and merely to refer here briefly to his first experiments on falling bodies, which were made at this time. Some were performed by dropping various bodies from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa, and others by rolling balls down grooves arranged at different inclinations. It is difficult to us nowadays, when scientific experiments are so common, to realise the novelty and importance at the end of the 16th century of such simple experiments. The mediaeval tradition of carrying out scientific investigation largely by the interpretation of texts in Aristotle, Galen, or other great writers of the past, and by the deduction of results from general principles which were to be found in these writers without any fresh appeal to observation, still prevailed almost undisturbed at Pisa, as elsewhere. It was in particular commonly asserted, on the authority of Aristotle, that, the cause of the fall of a heavy body being its weight, a heavier body must fall faster than a lighter one and in proportion to its greater weight. It may perhaps be doubted whether any one before Galilei's time had clear enough ideas on the subject to be able to give a definite answer to such a question as how much farther a ten-pound weight would fall in a second than a one-pound
- ↑ On an instrument which he had invented, called the hydrostatic balance.
