heavier; he established the first law of motion; determined the laws of falling bodies; and, having obtained a clear notion of acceleration and of the independence of different motions, was able to prove that projectiles move in parabolic curves. Up to his time it was believed that a cannon-ball moved forward at first in a straight line and then suddenly fell vertically to the ground. Galileo had an understanding of centrifugal forces, and gave a correct definition of momentum. Though he formulated the fundamental principle of statics, known as the parallelogram of forces, yet he did not fully recognise its scope. The principle of virtual velocities was partly conceived by Guido Ubaldo (died 1607), and afterwards more fully by Galileo.
Galileo is the founder of the science of dynamics. Among his contemporaries it was chiefly the novelties he detected in the sky that made him celebrated, but Lagrange claims that his astronomical discoveries required only a telescope and perseverance, while it took an extraordinary genius to discover laws from phenomena, which we see constantly and of which the true explanation escaped all earlier philosophers. The first contributor to the science of mechanics after Galileo was Descartes.
DESCARTES TO NEWTON.
Among the earliest thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who employed their mental powers toward the destruction of old ideas and the up-building of new ones, ranks René Descartes (1596–1650). Though he professed orthodoxy in faith all his life, yet in science he was a profound sceptic. He found that the world's brightest thinkers had been long exercised in metaphysics, yet they had discovered nothing
