Galileo's speech and presence put the
abstract Ricci in the shadow. The right man can make anything
interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the
broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, Hamlet to the
contrary, notwithstanding.

Galileo knew the Florentine heart, and so he gave lectures on a
Florentine: one Dante, who loved a girl named Beatrice.

The young Pisan drew diagrams of Dante's Inferno--and surely it was
nobody's else. He gave its size, height, weight, and told how to reach
it.

He gave lectures on the Hydrostatic Balance and the Centers of Gravity,
and then published them as serials.

The Florentines crowned him with bay and enthusiastically proclaimed
him, "The Modern Archimedes."

* * * * *

Pisa now put forth efforts to have her gifted son come home. There was
always rivalry between Pisa and Florence. Pisa could not afford to
supply Florence her men of genius--let her depend upon production from
home, or go without.

Galileo became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa, a
life position, or at least one he could hold during good behavior.

One of the time-honored dictums of the day was that falling bodies fell
with a velocity proportioned to their weight. The question was first
thrashed out in the classroom; and after Galileo had slyly gotten all of
these scientific wiseacres to commit themselves, he invited them, with
their students, to the Leaning Tower.

Then he proved by ocular demonstrations that they were positively wrong.

It is very beautiful to teach Truth, but error should not be corrected
with too much eclat. If the love of Truth, alone, was the guiding
impulse of Galileo, he might have secretly explained his theory to one
of the wiseacres, and this wiseacre could have casually demonstrated it,
so all the rest could have said, "That is what we always knew and
taught."

Instead of this, Galileo compelled the entire faculty to back water and
dine on fricasseed crow.

They got even by calling him "a scientific bastardino," and at his next
lecture he was roundly hissed. Soon after he was bluntly informed that
his office was to teach the young, and not to undo the old.

And that is the way the troubles of Galileo began.

He might then have apologized, and slipped back into peace and obscurity
and later been tucked in by kind oblivion. But he had tasted blood, and
the rabies of setting straight the scie