consent, but only on condition that a third person should always be present during the conversations with Galileo.[1] Early in October Castelli arrived in Florence, where the Inquisitor-General, as charged by the Holy Office, gave him permission to visit Galileo, with the express prohibition, under pain of excommunication, to converse with him on the condemned doctrine of the earth's double motion.[2] The permission, however, to visit Galileo seems to have been very limited, for Castelli repeatedly wrote to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, with the most urgent entreaties to obtain an extension of it for him from the Pope. Castelli protests in this letter that he would rather lose his life than converse with Galileo on subjects forbidden by the Church. He gives as a reason for the need of more frequent interviews that he had received from the Grand Duke the twofold charge to minister to Galileo in spiritual matters, and to inform himself fully about the tables and ephemerides of the Medicean stars, because the Prince Giovanni Carlo, Lord High Admiral, was to take this discovery to Spain.[3] The cardinal replied that in consideration of these circumstances. Urban VIII. granted permission for more frequent visits to Galileo, under the known conditions;[4] but the official permission, was not issued until about November.[5] Nothing is known in history, however, of the Lord High Admiral's having ever taken Galileo's method of taking longitudes to the Peninsula.
During the same year (1638), the Elzevirs at Leyden issued Galileo's famous work: "Discourses on and Demon-
- ↑ Niccolini's despatches to Cioli of 15th and 25th Sept. (Wolynski, "La Diplomazia Toscana," etc., pp. 68, 69.)
- ↑ Fanano's letter to Card. Barberini of 4th Oct. (Op. x. p. 314.)
- ↑ See Castelli's letters to Card. F. Barberini of 2nd, 9th, and 16th Oct., in Pieralisi, pp. 291-296; and another of 23rd Oct., 1638, on an unnumbered page between fols. 552 and 553 of the Vat. MS. p. 175.
- ↑ See Card. Barberini's letters to Castelli of 16th and 30th Oct. (Pieralisi, pp. 294, 295, and 298.)
- ↑ Vat. MS. fol. 557 vo.
