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LAST YEARS AND DEATH.
301

"Dialoghi delle Nuove Scienze," made a number of additions, and added new evidence of great importance to science in two supplementary dialogues.[1]

During this last period of his life also, he again took up the negotiations with the States-General, broken off by his severe illness in 1638. After he became blind he had given up all his writings, calculations, and astronomical tables relating to the Medicean stars, to his old pupil. Father Vincenzo Renieri, in order that he might carry them further; he was well adapted for the task, and executed it with equal skill and zeal.[2] The new ephemerides were just about to be sent to Hortensius, when Diodati informed Galileo of his sudden death in a letter of 28th October, 1639.[3] The three other commissioners charged by the States-General with the investigation of Galileo's proposal having also died one after another, in quick succession, it was difficult to resume the negotiations. The interest of the Netherlanders in Galileo's scheme (perhaps from its acknowledged imperfection) had also evidently cooled, and his proposal to replace the commissioners was not carried out, although he offered to send Renieri to Holland to give all needful explanations by word of mouth. Galileo's death then put an end to these fruitless negotiations.[4]

At the beginning of 1640 Fortunio Liceti, a former pupil of Galileo's, published a book on the phosphorescent Bolognian stone. In the fiftieth chapter of this work he treats of the faint light of the side of the moon not directly illuminated

  1. ↑ Op. vii. pp. 238, 239; xiii. pp. 267-332; xv. pp. 358-360.
  2. ↑ See his letters to Galileo in 1639 and 1640. (Op. x. pp. 336, 339, 340, 350, 351 362, 363, 382, 383, 402, 419, 420; also xv. (Viviani, pp. 356, 357.)
  3. ↑ Op. vii. pp. 240, 241.
  4. ↑ Comp. Op. vii. pp. 243-254. In 1648 Renieri was intending to bring out Galileo's calculations about the satellites of Jupiter, and their application to navigation, which he had completed by long years of labour, when his death occurred after a short illness. The papers were then lost, but were afterwards discovered by Albèri, who arranged them and incorporated them in the "Opere di Galileo Galilei," v.
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