referred with great acuteness to the slight inclination of the sun’s axis of rotation to the plane of the ecliptic. Thus, when the earth finds herself in the plane of the sun’s equator, which occurs at two opposite points of her orbit, the spots, travelling in circles parallel with that plane, necessarily appear to describe right lines; but when the earth is above or below the equatorial level, the paths of the spots open out into curves turned downwards or upwards, according to the direction in which they are seen. But the explanation of this phenomenon is equally consistent with the geocentric as with the heliocentric theory of the solar system. The idea of a universal force of gravitation seems to have hovered on the borders of this great man’s mind, without ever fully entering it. He perceived the analogy between the power which holds the moon in the neighbourhood of the earth, and compels Jupiter’s satellites to circulate round their primary, and the attraction exercised by the earth on bodies at its surface;[1] but he failed to conceive the combination of central force with tangential velocity, and was disposed to connect the revolutions of the planets with the axial rotation of the sun. This notion, it is plain, tended rather towards Descartes’s theory of vortices than towards Newton’s theory of gravitation. More valid instances of the anticipation of modern discoveries may be found in his prevision that a small annual parallax would eventually be found for some of the fixed stars, and that extra-Saturnian planets would at some future time be ascertained to exist, and in his conviction that light travels with a measurable, although, in relation to terrestrial distances, infinite velocity.
The invention of the microscope, attributed to Galileo by his first biographer, Vincenzio Viviani, does not in truth belong to him. Such an instrument was made as early as 1590 by Zacharias Jansen of Middleburg; and although Galileo discovered, in 1610, a means of adapting his telescope to the examination of minute objects, he did not become acquainted with the compound microscope until 1624 when he saw one of Drebbel’s instruments in Rome, and, with characteristic ingenuity, immediately introduced some material improvements into its construction.
The most substantial, if not the most brilliant part of his work consisted undoubtedly in his contributions towards the establishment of mechanics as a science. Some valuable but isolated facts and theorems had been previously discovered and proved, but it was he who first clearly grasped the idea of force as a mechanical agent, and extended to the external world the conception of the invariability of the relation between cause and effect. From the time of Archimedes there had existed a science of equilibrium, but the science of motion began with Galileo. It is not too much to say that the final triumph of the Copernican system was due in larger measure to his labours in this department than to his direct arguments in its favour. The problem of the heavens is essentially a mechanical one; and without the mechanical conceptions of the dependence of motion upon force which Galileo familiarized to men’s minds, that problem might have remained a sealed book even to the intelligence of Newton. The interdependence of motion and force was not indeed formulated into definite laws by Galileo, but his writings on dynamics are everywhere suggestive of those laws, and his solutions of dynamical problems involve their recognition. The extraordinary advances made by him in this branch of knowledge were owing to his happy method of applying mathematical analysis to physical problems. As a pure mathematician he was, it is true, surpassed in profundity by more than one among his pupils and contemporaries; and in the wider imaginative grasp of abstract geometrical principles he cannot be compared with Fermat, Descartes or Pascal, to say nothing of Newton or Leibnitz. Still, even in the region of pure mathematics, his powerful and original mind left notable traces of its working. He studied the properties of the cycloid, and attempted the problem of its quadrature; and in the “infinitesimals,” which he was one of the first to introduce into geometrical demonstrations, was contained the fruitful germ of the differential calculus. But the method which was peculiarly his, and which still forms the open road to discoveries in natural science, consisted in the combination of experiment with calculation—in the transformation of the concrete into the abstract, and the assiduous comparison of results. The first-fruits of the new system of investigation was his determination of the laws of falling bodies. Conceiving that the simplest principle is the most likely to be true, he assumed as a postulate that bodies falling freely towards the earth descend with a uniformly accelerated motion, and deduced thence that the velocities acquired are in the direct, and the spaces traversed in the duplicate ratio of the times, counted from the beginning of motion; finally, he proved, by observing the times of descent of bodies falling down inclined planes, that the postulated law was the true law. Even here, he was obliged to take for granted that the velocities acquired in descending from the same height along planes of every inclination are equal; and it was not until shortly before his death that he found the mathematical demonstration of this not very obvious principle.
The first law of motion—that which expresses the principle of inertia—is virtually contained in the idea of uniformly accelerated velocity. The recognition of the second—that of the independence of different motions—must be added to form the true theory of projectiles. This was due to Galileo. Up to his time it was universally held in the schools that the motion of a body should cease with the impulse communicated to it, but for the “reaction of the medium” helping it forward. Galileo showed, on the contrary, that the nature of motion once impressed is to continue indefinitely in a uniform direction, and that the effect of the medium is a retarding, not an impelling one. Another commonly received axiom was that no body could be affected by more than one movement at one time, and it was thus supposed that a cannon ball, or other projectile, moves forward in a right line until its first impulse is exhausted, when it falls vertically to the ground. In the fourth of Galileo’s dialogues on mechanics, he demonstrated that the path described by a projectile, being the result of the combination of a uniform transverse motion with a uniformly accelerated vertical motion, must, apart from the resistance of the air, be a parabola. The establishment of the principle of the composition of motions formed a conclusive answer to the most formidable of the arguments used against the rotation of the earth, and we find it accordingly triumphantly brought forward by Galileo in the second of his dialogues on the systems of the world. It was urged by anti-Copernicans that a body flung upward or cast downward would, if the earth were in motion, be left behind by the rapid translation of the point from which it started; Galileo proved on the contrary that the reception of a fresh impulse in no way interfered with the movement already impressed, and that the rotation of the earth was insensible, because shared equally by all bodies at its surface. His theory of the inclined plane, combined with his satisfactory definition of “momentum,” led him towards the third law of motion. We find Newton’s theorem, that “action and reaction are equal and opposite,” stated with approximate precision in his treatise Della scienza meccanica, which contains the substance of lectures delivered during his professorship at Padua; and the same principle is involved in the axiom enunciated in the third of his mechanical dialogues, that “the propensity of a body to fall is equal to the least resistance which suffices to support it.” The problems of percussion, however, received no definitive solution until after his death.
His services were as conspicuous in the statical as in the kinetical division of mechanics. He gave the first satisfactory demonstration of equilibrium on an inclined plane, reducing it to the level by a sound and ingenious train of reasoning; while, by establishing the theory of “virtual velocities,” he laid down the fundamental principle which, in the opinion of Lagrange, contains the general expression of the laws of equilibrium. He
- ↑ The passage is sufficiently remarkable to deserve quotation in the original:—“Le parti della Terra hanno tal propensione al centro di essa, che quando ella cangiasse luogo, le dette parti, benchè lontane dal globo nel tempo delle mutazioni di esso, lo seguirebbero per tutto; esempio di ciò sia il seguito perpetuo delle Medicee, ancorchè separate continuamente da Giove. L’istesso si deve dire della Luna, obbligata a seguir la Terra.”—Dialogo dei massimi sistemi, Giornata terza, p. 351 of Albèri’s edition.
