Mr. Justice Best in the month of November 1819, sat as a judge in the Court of King's Bench, and advised the sending me to the gaol of Dorchester for three years and the imposing a fine upon me of fifteen hundred pounds for stating and supporting a great philosophical truth. Not content with the imposition of this enormous fine and tremendous imprisonment, he also immediately sanctioned the issuing of a writ of _levari facias_, on the very same day, by which my business and my property was destroyed, and by which: cause I am at present deprived of all visible means of making up that fine. Yet, Mr. Justice Best, had the effrontery to say from the bench, which should ever be sacred to truth and justice, that no philosophical truth stated and supported in this country, would be considered libelous! I do aver, and I challenge any Man of Science to contradict me publicly, if he dares, that the two volumes, for the publication of which I am now suffering imprisonment, and for which I have been so excessively fined and robbed, contain nothing more than philosophical truths, as plain, as, simple and as important, as those for which Galileo was imprisoned by the Christian Inquisition, about two hundred years since. I appeal to Mr. Justice Best himself--he knows the truth of what I now write--yet he has had the effrontery, in contempt of the good sense and discernment of the whole country, to put forth this vile falsehood--still more vile, because he himself partook in the order for my punishment, Galileo was told in the seventeenth century by the Magnificent Inquisitor General that, his astronomical ideas were not in unison with the Holy Scriptures, and that he must not promulgate them. Mr Justice Best told me in November 1819, that he would not sit on the bench as a judge and hear a particle of the Bible called in question. Then where is the difference in the conduct of those two Magnificent Inquisitors General, and between my case and that of Galileo? The Judges who condemned Galileo were quite mild and humane when compared with mine, they did not rob him of all his property and fix a fine with a hope that he would never be able to pay it: they merely, in addition to his imprisonment, ordered him to repeat, aloud the seven penitential psalms once a week! Canst thou Mr. Justice Best read this statement and these observations, and again take thy seat as a judge in a Court of law or what ought to be a Court of Justice? Blush! Best! blush! Every Man of Science--every lover of great philosophical truths, will proclaim thee a liar for thy assertion on the bench at Carlisle in Cumberland. The very name of the place might have reminded thee of the grossness of that assertion!