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The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler By David, Sir Brewster

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Galileo announces his Discoveries in Enigmas.?Discovers the Crescent of Venus; the Ring of Saturn; the Spots on the Sun.?Similar Observations made in England by Harriot.?Claims of Fabricius and Scheiner to the Discovery of the Solar Spots.?Galileo's Letters toVelser on the Claims of Scheiner.?His Residence at the Villa of Salviati.? Composes his Work on Floating Bodies, which involve him in new Controversies. The great success which attended the first tele- scopic observations of Galileo induced him to apply his best instruments to the other planets of our system. The attempts which had been made to deprive him of the honour of some of his discover- ies, combined, probably, with a desire to repeat his observations with better telescopes, led him to announce his discoveries under the veil of an enigma, and to invite astronomers to declare, within a given time, if they had observed any new phenomena in the heavens. Before the close of 1610 Galileo excited the curiosity of astronomers by the publication of his first enigma. Kepler and others tried in vain to decipher it; but, in consequence of the Emperor Rodolph requesting a solution of the puzzle, Galileo sent him the following clew: Altissimam planetam tergeminam observavi. I have observed that the most remote planet is triple. In explaining more fully the nature of his observation, Galileo remarked that Saturn was not a single star, but three together, nearly touching one another. He described them as having no relative motion, and as having the form of three o's, namely, oOo, the central one being larger than those on each side of it. Although Galileo had announced that nothing new appeared in the other planets, yet he soon communicated to the world another discovery of no slight interest. ...