having been torn out, it is not known by whom. The opinion of the most judicious Italian critics appears to be, that it would have been more for Galileo's credit if these remarks had never been made public: they are written in a spirit of flippant violence, such as might not be extraordinary in a common juvenile critic, but which it is painful to notice from the pen of Galileo. Two or three sonnets are extant written by Galileo himself, and in two instances he has not scrupled to appropriate the conceits of the poet he affected to undervalue.[172] It should be mentioned that Galileo's matured taste rather receded from the violence of his early prejudices, for at a later period of his life he used to shun comparing the two; and when forced to give an opinion he said, "that Tasso's appeared the finer poem, but that Ariosto gave him the greater pleasure." Besides these sonnets, there is extant a short burlesque poem written by him, "In abuse of Gowns," when, on his first becoming Professor at Pisa, he found himself obliged by custom to wear his professional habit in every company. It is written not without humour, but does not bear comparison with Berni, whom he imitated. There are several detached subjects treated of by Galileo, which may be noticed in this place. A letter by him containing the solution of a problem in Chances is probably the earliest notice extant of the application of mathematics to that interesting subject: the correspondence between Pascal and Fermat, with which its history is generally made to begin, not having taken place till at least twelve years later. There can be little doubt after the clear account of Carlo Dati, that Galileo was the first to examine the curve called the Cycloid, described by a point in the rim of a wheel rolling on a straight line, which he recommended as a graceful form for the arch of a bridge at Pisa. He even divined that the area contained between it and its base is exactly three times that of the generating circle. He seems to have been unable to verify this guess by strict geometrical reasoning, for Viviani tells an odd story, that in order to satisfy his doubts he cut out several large cycloids of pasteboard, but finding the weight in every trial to be rather less than three times that of the circle, he suspected the proportion to be irrational, and that there was some error in his estimation; the inquiry he abandoned was afterwards resumed with success by his pupil Torricelli.[173]