recorded in the Acts of the trial.[1] It is needless to say that among these papers there is not a trace either of any protest of Galileo's, nor of the certificates of the physicians of the Holy Office; and that according to the protocol of the hearing of 21st June, it never went so far, and the Pope himself, as the decree of 16th June undoubtedly proves, never intended that it should.
No, Galileo never suffered bodily torture, nor was he even terrified by being taken into the torture chamber and shown the instruments; he was only mentally stretched upon the rack, by the verbal threat of it in the ordinary judgment hall, while the whole painful procedure, and finally the humiliating public recantation, was but a prolonged torture for the old man in his deep distress. Libri, Brewster, and other rhetorical authors have desired to stamp Galileo as a "martyr of science" in the full sense of the words. But this will not do for two reasons, as Henri Martin[2] justly points out. In the first place, Galileo did not suffer torture; and in the second, a true martyr, that is, a witness unto blood, never under any circumstances, not even on burning coals, abjures his opinions, or he does not deserve the name.
For the sake of Galileo's moral greatness, his submission may be regretted, but at all events greater benefit has accrued from it to science, than if, in consequence of a noble steadfastness which we should have greeted with enthusiasm, he had perished prematurely at the stake or had languished in the dungeons of the Inquisition. It was after the famous trial that he presented the world with his immortal "Dialoghi delle Nuove Scienze."
