In the fifty years which intervened between Galileo and James Gregorie, Louis, the great monarch of France, had taken science under his care, so the Inquisition was no longer available as a means of preventing the spread of original thought, and Gregorie, unsuspecting of the pope’s attitude towards him, went to very Padua itself, and stayed there for three years. Padua, with its still colonnades and drowsy population, is visited now, not in the eager search for learning, but because of the pale frescoes with which Giotto had gifted it long before Gregorie was there, but in the seventeenth century, what other attractions drew men thither! Then such men as Riccioli, Manfredi and De Angelis were drawing the erudite from far and near to sit at their feet. Such men as Manfredi and De Angelis, who were they? Alas! they, the great mathematical champions of their day, have passed into oblivion, and are only remembered now, even in Padua, by the work of the masons who carved their names on the walls of the University. ‘In thine halls the lamp of learning Padua, now no more is burning; Like a meteor, whose wild way Is lost over the grave of day, It gleams betrayed and to betray: Once remotest nations came To adore that sacred flame, When it lit not many a hearth On this cold and gloomy earth; Now new fires from Antique light Spring beneath the wide world’s might: But their spark lies dead in thee, Trampled out by tyranny.’ As for Gregorie, he was at variance with Riccioli, De Angelis and Manfredi, and though we have only negative evidence, we hope that he was at one with the other great teachers of his time in Italy. _Optica Promota_ had been much read on the Continent, and there the suggestion which he made that the solar parallax might be determined by the transit of Venus and Mercury had been accepted, and till a few years ago it was the method employed in finding out the distance of the sun. But after all, the most beautiful piece of Gregorie’s work was his telescope. ‘It consists of a parabolic concave speculum with a hole in its centre, having near its focus a small elliptic concave speculum. The image formed by the large parabolic speculum is received by the small elliptical one, and reflected through the aperture in the former upon a lens which magnifies it.’