Collegio Romano, and was in the monastery behind the Church of St.
Ignasio. Its director was the Father Secchi who had visited the United
States, and was well known to the scientists of this country.

"I said to myself, 'This is the land of Galileo, and this is the city in
which he was tried. I knew of no sadder picture in the history of
science than that of the old man, Galileo, worn by a long life of
scientific research, weak and feeble, trembling before that tribunal
whose frown was torture, and declaring that to be false which he knew to
be true. And I know of no picture in the history of religion more weakly
pitiable than that of the Holy Church trembling before Galileo, and
denouncing him because he found in the Book of Nature truths not stated
in their own Book of God--forgetting that the Book of Nature is also a
Book of God.

"It seems to be difficult for any one to take in the idea that two
truths cannot conflict.

"Galileo was the first to see the four moons of Jupiter; and when he
announced the fact that four such moons existed, of course he was met by
various objections from established authority. One writer declared that
as astrologers had got along very well without these planets, there
could be no reason for their starting into existence.

"But his greatest heresy was this: He was tried, condemned, and punished
for declaring that the sun was the centre of the system, and that the
earth moved around it; also, that the earth turned on its axis.

"For teaching this, Galileo was called before the assembled cardinals of
Rome, and, clad in black cloth, was compelled to kneel, and to promise
never again to teach that the earth moved. It is said that when he arose
he whispered, 'It does move!'

"He was tried at the Hall of Sopre Minerva. In fewer than two hundred
years from that time the Church of St. Ignasio was built, and the
monastery on whose walls the instruments of the modern observatory
stand.

"It is a very singular fact, but one which seems to show that even in
science 'the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,' that the
spot where Galileo was tried is very near the site of the present
observatory, to which the pope was very liberal.

"From the Hall of Sopre Minerva you make but two turns through short
streets to the Fontenelle de Borghese, in the rear of which stands the
present observatory.

"Indeed, if a cardinal should, at the Hall of Sopre Minerva, call out to
Secchi, 'Watchma