Famous Men of Science

"I send two baked pears for these days of vigil. But as the greatest treat of all, I send you a rose, which ought to please you extremely, seeing what a rarity it is at this season. And with the rose, you must accept its thorns, which represent the bitter passion of our Lord, while the green leaves represent the hope we may entertain that through the same Sacred Passion we, having passed through the darkness of this short winter of our mortal life, may attain to the brightness and felicity of an eternal spring in heaven."

"Only in one respect does cloister life weigh heavily on me; that is, that it prevents my attending on you personally, which would be my desire, were it permitted. My thoughts are always with you."

And so the seven years of study went by, with the sweet love of Maria Celeste to brighten them. There are none so great that they can live without affection.

At the end of the seven years, Urban VIII. came to the pontifical throne, and Galileo and other scientists rejoiced, for he had seemed liberal in thought and generous in heart. When he was cardinal, he had sent a letter to Galileo, saying, "The esteem which I always entertain for yourself and your great merits has given occasion to the enclosed verses. If not worthy of you, they will serve at any rate as a proof of my affection, while I purpose to add lustre to my poetry by your renowned name. Without wasting words, then, in further apologies, which I leave to the confidence which I place in you, I beg you to receive with favor this insignificant proof of my great affection."

At Easter, 1624, Galileo, now sixty years old, resolved to proceed to Rome, to welcome the new pope, and urge his approval of the Copernican theory. Frail in health, he was carried most of the way in a litter. During a visit of six weeks, he had six long audiences with Urban VIII.; but, though he was affably received, the pope was in no wise convinced, but rather tried to convince Galileo that he was in error.

Yet so kind was he that Galileo went back to Florence with the hope and belief that he could bring out his great work, "Dialogues on the Two Principal Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and Copernican," without opposition from the church. In this book, Galileo gave the results of scientific research and discovery in the half century preceding, using such clear yet brilliant style in writing as to make the work attractive even to the unlearned.

It was ready for publication in March, 1630, but to be sure that the pope did not object, Galileo was urged to go in person to Rome. He went and presented the matter to Urban, who gave his consent provided that the title should show that the Copernican system was treated as a hypothesis merely, and that he, the pope, should write the closing argument.

Rather than forego the publication of that upon which he had worked for years, Galileo consented, and returned to Florence. A license to publish was then obtained from the Inquisitor-General, and the Vicar-General of Florence, after great delay. A second and a third time the papal authorities wished to look over the manuscript. Two years went slowly by.

Other anxieties came to the man of sixty-eight, besides the long delay. The impecunious Michelangelo sent his wife, seven children, and a German nurse, to the home of Galileo, to be taken care of. The eldest nephew was sent to Rome to study music. He was found to be obstinate, impudent, and dissolute, "wicked ways" which his weak and indulgent father said "he did not learn from me, or any one else belonging to him. It must have been the fault of his wet nurse!"

Galileo's son Vincenzo had married and brought his wife home to live. Strange fortune for this man of genius! Strange that he must have helpless relatives, and constant pecuniary troubles. Most great lives are as pathetic as they are great.

As ever, the one gleam of light was the daily letter from Maria Celeste, in which she expressed a tenderness beyond what any daughter ever had for a father. "But I do not know how to express myself, except by saying that I love you better than myself. For, after God, I belong to you; and your kindnesses are so numberless that I feel I could put my life in peril, were it to save you from any trouble, excepting only that I would not offend His Divine Majesty."

Finally Galileo moved to Arcetri, over against the convent, to be near the one who alone satisfied his heart.

In January, 1632, the "Dialogues" appeared. Copies were sent to his friends and disciples throughout Italy. The whole country applauded, and at last Galileo seemed to have won the homage he had so long deserved.

But a storm was gathering. Enemies were at work prejudicing the mind of Urban VIII., making him feel that Galileo had wrought evil to the church. At once an order came from the Inquisition to secure every copy in the booksellers' shops throughout Italy, and to forward all copies to Rome.

In October of the same year of publication, Galileo was summoned to appear at Rome, to answer to that terror of past centuries, the charge of heresy. His friends urged that he was old and feeble, and that he would die on the journey, but Urban's commands were peremptory.

Galileo was deeply depressed by the summons, and wrote a friend: "This vexes me so much that it makes me curse the time devoted to these studies, in which I strove and hoped to deviate somewhat from the beaten track generally pursued by learned men. I not only repent having given the world a portion of my writings, but feel inclined to suppress those still in hand, and to give them to the flames, and thus satisfy the longing desire of my enemies, to whom my ideas are so inconvenient."

On January 20, 1633, the decrepit old man set out in a litter for Rome, arriving on February 13. On April 12, he was brought before the Inquisition, and briefly examined and then remanded to prison, though treated with great leniency. The anxiety and deprivation from outdoor exercise brought on illness, and he was confined to his bed till led a second time before the Inquisition, April 30.

Weak, aged, in fear of torture, he made the melancholy confession that his "error had been one of vainglorious ambition, and pure ignorance and inadvertence." Pure ignorance! from the man who had studied for fifty years all that the world knew of science! But he recalled how men had died at the stake for offending the church. The world is not full of men and women who can suffer death for their convictions, however much we may admire such courage. On May 10, he was summoned a third time before the Inquisition, and told that he had eight days in which to write his defence. In touching language he stated how the book had been examined and re examined by the authorities, so that there might be nothing heterodox in it; and then he urged them to consider his age and feeble health.

A fourth time he came before the Holy Congregation, June 21, and was asked whether he held that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and that the earth is not the centre, and that it moves. He replied, "I do not hold, and have not held this opinion of Copernicus since the command was intimated to me that I must abandon it; for the rest, I am here in your hands, – do with me what you please."

And then June 22, in the forenoon, in the large hall of the Dominican Convent of St. Maria sopra la Minerva, in the presence of cardinals and prelates, he heard his sentence.

"The proposition that the sun is the centre of the world and does not move from its place is absurd, and false philosophically, and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to the Holy Scripture.

"The proposition that the earth is not the centre of the world and immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically; and theologically considered, at least, erroneous in faith… Invoking, therefore, the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His most glorious mother and ever Virgin Mary … we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, that you, the said Galileo, by reason of the matters adduced in process, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself, in the judgment of this Holy Office, vehemently suspected of heresy, – namely, of having believed and held the doctrine, which is false and contrary to the sacred and divine Scriptures, – that the sun is the centre of the world and does not move from east to west, and that the earth moves and is not the centre of the world… We condemn you to the formal prison of this Holy Office during our pleasure, and, by way of salutary penance, we enjoin that for three years to come you repeat once a week the seven Penitential Psalms."

Galileo was also required to "abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies." And then the white-haired man of seventy, humbly kneeling before the whole assembly, made the pitiful abjuration of his belief. "I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and, generally, all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church."

Pitiful spectacle of intolerance! If we of this nineteenth century have learned to tolerate and treat with respect the beliefs of others though widely divergent from our own, perhaps this wretched drama was not acted in vain.

It has been said that Galileo exclaimed as he rose from his feet, "E pur si muove," "It moves, for all that," but this would have been well nigh an impossibility, in the midst of men who would instantly have taken him to a dungeon, and the story is no longer believed.

On July 9, poor Galileo was allowed to leave Rome for Siena, where he stayed five months in the house of the archbishop, and then became a prisoner in his own house at Arcetri, with strict injunctions that he was "not to entertain friends, nor to allow the assemblage of many at a time."

He wrote sadly to Maria Celeste, "My name is erased from the book of the living." Tender words came back, saying that it seemed "a thousand years" since she had seen him, and that she would recite the seven penitential psalms for him, "to save you the trouble of remembering it."

In less than a year, sweet Maria Celeste had said the last psalms for him. She died April 1, 1634, at thirty-three years of age, leaving Galileo heart-broken; "a woman," he said, "of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me."

He went to work on another book, but he said, pathetically, "I hear her constantly calling me!" Beautiful spirit, that will forever shed a halo around the name of Galileo Galilei!

In the summer of 1636, he completed his "Dialogues on Motion," and sent it to Leyden for publication. The next year he made his last discovery, known as the moon's librations.

The house at Arcetri had become dark and lonely. The wife of Michelangelo, her three daughters and a son, had all died of the plague. It was doubly dark, for Galileo had become hopelessly blind, "so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvellous discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations."

His last work was a short treatise on the secondary light of the moon. "I am obliged now," he said, sadly, "to have recourse to other hands and other pens than mine since my sad loss of sight. This, of course, occasions great loss of time, particularly now that my memory is impaired by advanced age; so that in placing my thoughts on paper, many and many a time I am forced to have the foregoing sentences read to me before I can tell what ought to follow; else I should repeat the same thing over and over."

He had planned other work, but death came on the evening of January 8, 1642, eight years after Celeste left him. His beloved pupils, Torricelli and Viviani, and his son Vincenzo, stood by his bedside.

He desired to be buried in the family vault of the Galilei in Santa Croce, at Florence, and the city at once voted a public funeral and three thousand crowns for a marble mausoleum. But the church at Rome prevented, lest the pernicious doctrine that the earth moves, should thereby have confirmation. He was therefore buried in an obscure corner of Del Noviziato, a side chapel of Santa Croce.

A century later, March 12, 1737, in the presence of the learned men of Italy, with great ceremony, the bones of Galileo were removed to a new resting-place in Santa Croce, and buried with his beloved friend, Viviani. An imposing monument was erected over him. The truth finally triumphed, as it always does. The works of Galileo, in sixteen volumes, are no longer prohibited, as they were in his lifetime.

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

In the same year, 1642, in which Galileo, sad and blind, went away from the earth, Sir Isaac Newton came to make his home upon it.

He was born December 25, the only child of Isaac Newton and Hannah Ayscough. The father died at thirty-seven, a few months after his marriage, and the young wife, after the birth of her child, was both father and mother to the helpless infant. He was so frail that there seemed little probability that he could live to manhood, or even boyhood. Naturally, between mother and son there grew a most ardent affection, which neither time nor death could change.

The manor-house of Woolsthorpe in Colsterworth, Lincoln county, was a two-story stone building, owned for a century by the Newton family, and bringing a limited income from the little farm in connection with it. Here Isaac passed his childhood, going to the schools near by, and learning to read, write, and cipher.

At twelve, he was sent to the public school at Grantham, where he showed little taste for study, and managed easily to stand at the foot of his class. When he was the last in the lowermost form but one, the boy next above him, as they were going to school, gave Isaac a kick, which occasioned severe pain. Stirred with wrath, Isaac challenged the other boy to a fight. For this purpose, they repaired to a neighboring churchyard, where young Newton, though much the smaller and weaker of the two, pounded his antagonist till he was glad to come to any terms of submission.

He resolved now that this boy should no longer stand above him in scholarship, and with a new ambition and energy born of his insult, he soon rose to the highest place in the school. It was not idleness, probably, that made Newton a poor scholar, but his mind was absorbed with making saws, hammers, hatchets, and other tools.

He made a windmill and placed it on the top of his home, the wind putting it in motion. When there was no wind, a novel expedient was resorted to. A mouse, which was called "the miller," was trained to turn the windmill by walking on a tread wheel, with some corn just beyond his reach! All through life, he was exceedingly kind to animals, and could never tolerate shooting or hunting for sport. He objected to one of his nephews, when praised in his presence, "that he loved killing of birds," and this was sufficient to win his disesteem. It is probable, therefore, that the little mouse was kindly cared for by the young experimenter.

He also made a water clock, about four feet high, with a dial-plate at the top, with figures of the hours. The index was turned by a piece of wood, which either fell or rose by water dropping. Every morning the lad supplied his clock with the proper amount of water.

Besides these, he invented a four-wheeled carriage, which was moved with a handle by the person who sat in it. For his boy friends, he made lanterns of "crimpled paper" with a candle inside, to light them to school in the dark winter mornings, and paper kites of the best form and proportion. In dark nights he tied the lanterns to the tails of his kites, and ignorant people sometimes mistook them for comets!

On the manor-house at Woolsthorpe he carved sun-dials, which were visible a century later. He was a "sober, silent, and thinking lad," who was always hammering in his room, or making drawings with his pen and pencil, designing with charcoal on his walls, birds, animals, ships, and mathematical diagrams.

Mrs. Newton, the mother, had married again, after a singular courtship. "Mr. Smith, a neighboring clergyman, who had a very good estate, had lived a bachelor till he was pretty old, and, one of his parishioners advising him to marry, he said he did not know where to meet with a good wife. The man answered, 'The widow Newton is an extraordinary good woman.' 'But,' said Mr. Smith, 'how do I know she will have me, and I don't care to ask and be denied; but if you will go and ask her, I will pay you for your day's work.'

"He went accordingly. Her answer was, she would be advised by her brother Ayscough, upon which Mr. Smith sent the same person to Mr. Ayscough on the same errand, who, upon consulting with his sister, treated with Mr. Smith, who gave her son Isaac a parcel of land, one of the terms insisted upon by the widow if she married him."

Though for a time she was thus removed from Isaac, leaving him with his grandmother, on the death of Rev. Mr. Smith, she returned to the manor-house.

When Isaac had reached his fifteenth year, his mother, not seeming to think of any profession for her mechanical son, decided to make of him a farmer and grazier. On Saturdays, the market day at Grantham, she would send him with grain and other agricultural produce, in the care of an old and trusty servant. The boy had no taste for selling produce, and would hasten to the attic in the house of Mr. Clark, an apothecary, with whom he had boarded while at school, and there spend his hours in reading old books, till the time came for him to go home, the servant meantime having sold the vegetables.

Sometimes, however, the lad would not go as far as Grantham, but, seating himself beside a hedge along the road, would read some favorite author till the servant returned. When his mother sent him to watch the cattle, they enjoyed a neighbor's corn-field, while he enjoyed a book or whittled out water-wheels. It did not seem intentional disobedience toward a mother of whom he was very fond, but complete absorption in some other pursuit.

When he was sixteen he was greatly interested in finding the proper form of a body which would offer the least resistance when moving in a fluid. In a severe storm, to test the force of the gale, he jumped first in the direction in which the wind blew, and then in opposition to the wind, and after measuring the length of the leap in both directions, and comparing it with the length to which he could jump in a perfectly calm day, he was enabled to compute the force of the storm.

His mother soon found that her boy would not make a successful farmer, and sent him back to school at Grantham, to prepare for Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered when he was nineteen.

It is probable that the time spent at Grantham was a happy time; for young Newton there met and, it is said, loved Miss Storey, sister of Dr. Storey, a physician near Colsterworth, and daughter of the apothecary's second wife. She was two or three years younger than Newton, a girl of attractive face and unusual talents. As his income as a Fellow was small, after leaving college, they did not marry, though his interest in her continued unabated through life. Though she was twice married, he never paid a visit to Woolsthorpe without going to see her, and liberally relieved her from little pecuniary embarrassments, when his own circumstances had become easy. How the world loves constancy; an affection which knows no change! That he would have been happier in those quiet years of study, even in his poverty, had he married, is probable; but that the world gained by his undivided devotion to science, is equally probable.

On July 8, 1661, Newton entered college, and soon, through the study of Descartes' Geometry, showed his skill in higher mathematics. And now began an almost unexampled development of mind.

At twenty-two, he was studying a comet so closely, and the circles and halo round the moon, that he impaired his health by sitting up late at night. In 1665, May 20, when he was twenty-three, he committed to writing his first discovery of fluxions – "the infinitely small increase or decrease of a variable or flowing quantity in a certain infinitely small and constant period of time."

The same year, when the college had been dismissed on account of the plague in Cambridge, Newton made his immortal discovery of the Attraction of Gravitation. While sitting alone in his garden at Woolsthorpe, and observing an apple fall to the ground, it occurred to him that as the same power by which the apple fell was not sensibly diminished at the summits of the loftiest spires, nor on the tops of the highest mountains, it might extend to the moon, about which he had been studying, and retain her in her orbit. If to the moon, why not to the planets?

The tree from which the apple fell was so much decayed in 1820, that it was cut down, but the wood was carefully preserved by Mr. Turnor of Stoke Rocheford.

In the beginning of the following year, 1666, when Newton was twenty-four, he purchased a prism, in order to make some experiments on Descartes' theory of colors. He made a hole in his window shutter, darkened the room, and admitted a ray of the sunlight. On the opposite wall he saw the solar or prismatic spectrum, an elongated image of the sun, about five times as long as it was broad, and consisting of seven different colors; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. White light was thus discovered to be of a compound nature; a mixture of all the colors. He said, "Whiteness is the usual color of light; for light is a confused aggregate of rays endued with all sorts of colors, as they are promiscuously darted from the various parts of luminous bodies." If any one color predominates, the light will incline to that color, as the yellow flame of a candle. Heretofore, there had been all sorts of conjectures about the nature and origin of colors. Descartes believed them to be a modification of light, depending on the direct or rotary motion of its particles. But Newton showed by many experiments that color is a property of light, or innate in light itself. We speak of a thing as red because it reflects red, and absorbs all the other colors. The green leaf stops or absorbs the red, blue, and violet rays of the white light, and reflects and transmits only those which compose its green.

He also found that the red rays are refracted or turned out of their course least of all the colors, and violet most, thereby discovering the different refrangibility of the rays of light; "a discovery which has had the most extensive applications to every branch of science, and, what is very rare in the history of inventions, one to which no other person has made the slightest claim."

His beautiful experiments with rings resulted in his Scale of Colors, of great value in optical research.

In 1668, when Newton was twenty-six, he constructed a small reflecting telescope, and soon a larger one, which he sent to the Royal Society; and was made a member of that body, in 1671. Two years previously he had been appointed to the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge.

He was now, at twenty-seven, spoken of as a man of "unparalleled genius." He had discovered the compound nature of white light, the attraction of gravity, fluxions, and made the first reflecting telescope ever directed toward the heavens, though one had been invented previously, by James Gregory, of Aberdeen. The boy who had thought of a mouse to turn his windmill had thought out some of the sublimest things in nature, and was henceforward to rank as one of the few masterminds of science. Newton's doctrine of colors met with the most bitter opposition. At last, he became so tired of the controversy, that he wrote Leibnitz, "I was so persecuted with discussions arising out of my theory of light, that I blamed my own imprudence for parting with so substantial a blessing as my quiet to run after a shadow." To another he wrote, "I see I have made myself a slave to philosophy; but if I get free of Mr. Linus's business, I will resolutely bid adieu to it eternally, excepting what I do for my private satisfaction, or leave to come out after me; for I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new, or to become a slave to defend it."

Newton was also troubled pecuniarily at this time, and asked to be excused from the weekly payments to the Royal Society, thereby resigning his membership. He even meditated the study of law, as his income was so limited. Strange that so many of the great things of this life are wrought out by those who are in sorrow or privation.