by its horizontal motion, and consequently it reaches the ground at the same time as a bullet simply allowed to drop; but Galilei gives no general statement of this principle, which was afterwards embodied by Newton in his Second Law of Motion.
The treatise on the Two New Sciences was finished in 1636, and, since no book of Galilei's could be printed in Italy, it was published after some little delay at Leyden in 1638. In the same year his eyesight, which he had to some extent recovered after his first attack of blindness, failed completely, and four years later (January 8th, 1642) the end came.
134. Galilei's chief scientific discoveries have already been noticed. The telescopic discoveries, on which much of his popular reputation rests, have probably attracted more than their fair share of attention; many of them were made almost simultaneously by others, and the rest, being almost inevitable results of the invention of the telescope, could not have been delayed long. But the skilful use which Galilei made of them as arguments for the Coppernican system, the no less important support which his dynamical discoveries gave to the same cause, the lucidity and dialectic brilliance with which he marshalled the arguments in favour of his views and demolished those of his opponents, together with the sensational incidents of his persecution, formed conjointly a contribution to the Coppernican controversy which was in effect decisive. Astronomical text-books still continued to give side by side accounts of the Ptolemaic and of the Coppernican systems, and the authors, at any rate if they were good Roman Catholics, usually expressed, in some more or less perfunctory way, their adherence to the former, but there was no real life left in the traditional astronomy; new advances in astronomical theory were all on Coppernican lines, and in the extensive scientific correspondence of Newton and his contemporaries the truth of the Coppernican system scarcely ever appears as a subject for discussion.
Galilei's dynamical discoveries, which are only in part of astronomical importance, are in many respects his most remarkable contribution to science. For whereas in
