winter, when he was lost in a storm. The blackboards in the lecture-hall[1] still bear the inscriptions left on them by the students and taken from the words of the master:
"Study Nature, not books."
"Be not afraid to say No.
"A Laboratory is a sanctuary which nothing profane should enter."
But, while the island of Penikese is deserted, the impulse which came from Agassiz's work there still lives, and is felt in every field of American science.
With all appreciation of the rich streams which in late years have come to us from Germany, it is still true that "the school of all schools which has most influence on scientific teaching in America was held in an old barn on an uninhabited island some eighteen miles from the shore. It lasted but three months, and in effect it had but one teacher. The school at Penikese existed in the personal presence of Agassiz; when he died it vanished!"
| NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. |
XV. ASTRONOMY.
By ANDREW DICKSON WHITE, LL. D., L. H. D.,
EX-PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY.
PART II.
WHILE news of triumphant attacks upon him and upon the truth he had established were coming in from all parts of Europe, Galileo prepared a careful treatise in the form of a dialogue, exhibiting the arguments for and against the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems, and offered to submit to any conditions that the Church tribunals might impose if they would allow it to be printed. At last, after discussions which extended through eight years, they consented, imposing a humiliating condition;—the preface written in accordance with the ideas of Father Ricciardi, Master of the Sacred Palace, and signed by Galileo, in which the Copernican theory was virtually exhibited as a play of the imagination, and not at all as opposed to the Ptolemaic doctrine reasserted in 1616 by the Inquisition under the direction of Pope Paul V.[2].
- ↑ According to Dr. Carl H. Eigenmann, who has lately visited the island.
- ↑ As to the general style of the attacks, see Fromundus's book, cited above, passim, but especially the heading of chapter vi, and the argument in chapters x and xi. For interesting reference to one of Fromundus's arguments, showing, by a mixture of mathematics and theology, that the earth is the center of the universe, see Quetelet, Histoire des Sciences mathématiques et physiques, Bruxelles, 1864, p. 170; also, Mädler, Geschichte der Astronomie, vol. i, p. 274
