alileo in mathematical
skill and power, though at the same time his achievements in this
department are by no means to be despised.

Born at Pisa on the very day that Michelangelo lay dying in Rome, he
inherited from his father a noble name, cultivated tastes, a keen love
of truth, and an impoverished patrimony. Vincenzo de Galilei, a
descendant of the important Bonajuti family, was himself a mathematician
and a musician, and in a book of his still extant he declares himself in
favor of free and open inquiry into scientific matters, unrestrained by
the weight of authority and tradition. In all probability the son
imbibed these precepts: certainly he acted on them.

Vincenzo, having himself experienced the unremunerative character of
scientific work, had a horror of his son's taking to it, especially as
in his boyhood he was always constructing ingenious mechanical toys and
exhibiting other marks of precocity. So the son was destined for
business--to be, in fact, a cloth-dealer. But he was to receive a good
education first, and was sent to an excellent convent school.

Here he made rapid progress, and soon excelled in all branches of
classics and literature. He delighted in poetry, and in later years
wrote several essays on Dante, Tasso, and Ariosto, besides composing
some tolerable poems himself. He played skilfully on several musical
instruments, especially on the lute, of which indeed he became a master,
and on which he solaced himself when quite an old man. Besides this, he
seems to have had some skill as an artist, which was useful afterward in
illustrating his discoveries, and to have had a fine sensibility as an
art critic, for we find several eminent painters of that day
acknowledging the value of the opinion of the young Galileo.

Perceiving all this display of ability, the father wisely came to the
conclusion that the selling of woollen stuffs would hardly satisfy his
aspirations for long, and that it was worth a sacrifice to send him to
the university. So to the university of his native town he went, with
the avowed object of studying medicine, that career seeming the most
likely to be profitable. Old Vincenzo's horror of mathematics or science
as a means of obtaining a livelihood is justified by the fact that while
the university professor of medicine received two thousand scudi a year,
the professor of mathematics had only sixty; that is thirteen pounds a
year, or seven and a half pence a day. So the son