length gave up the game for lost, and acknowledged, coram populo, that they were not only convinced but ready to defend them against those philosophers and mathematicians who ventured to attack them."[1]
But it was only at the University of Padua that Galileo could report such rapid progress; and until the Maginis, Clavios, and others were convinced by their own eyes, and confirmed to their own party the truth of Galileo's disclosures, he had to sustain a hard struggle with incredulity, malice, and peripatetic fanaticism. Some rabid Aristotelians went so far as to say that Galileo's telescope was so constructed as to show things that did not exist! Nor did it mend the matter much when he offered 10,000 scudi to any one who should construct so cunning an instrument.[2] Others resolutely refused even to look through the telescope, giving it as their firm conviction that they would not be able to see appearances which Aristotle had not said a word about in all his books! The answer that Aristotle was not acquainted with the telescope, and could not have known anything of telescopic appearances, rebounded without effect from the petrified infallibility of Aristotelian wisdom. Nor must it be supposed that these short-sighted conservatives only numbered a few would-be savans of the Peripatetic school; on the contrary, celebrities like Cesare Cremonino da Cento, and Julius Libri, denied Galileo's discoveries a priori.[3] When Libri died in December, 1610, without having been willing to look through a telescope, and protesting against Galileo's "absurdities," Galileo wrote in a letter of 17th December that this rigid opponent of his "absurdities," as he was never willing to look at them from earth, might perhaps see them on his way to heaven![4]
Some passages from a letter of Galileo's to Kepler, of 19th August, 1610, will best show how some of these men of science turned away with a righteous awe from the incon-
