The great truths of the Copernican system, instead of being considered as heretical, had been actually adopted by many pious members of the Catholic church, and even some of its dignitaries did not scruple to defend it openly. Previous to the first persecution of Galileo in 1615, a Neapolitan nobleman, Vincenzio Caraffa, a person equally distinguished by his piety and birth, had solicited Paul Anthony Foscarinus, a learned Carmelite monk, to illustrate and defend the new system of the universe. With this request the ecclesiastic speedily complied; and in the pamphlet which he completed on the 6th January, 1615, he defends the Copernican system with much boldness and ingenuity; he reconciles the various passages of Scripture with the new doctrine, and he expresses the hope that such an attempt, now made for the first time, will prove agreeable to philosophers, but particularly to those very learned men, Galileo Galilei, John Kepler, and all the members of the Lyncean Academy, who, he believes, entertain the same opinion. This remarkable production, written from the convent of the Carmelites at Naples, is dedicated to the very Reverend Sebastian Fantoni, general of the order of Carmelites, and was published at Florence, with the sanction of the ecclesiastical authorities, in 1630; three years before the second persecution of Galileo. It would be interesting to know the state of public feeling in Italy when Galileo was doomed to the prisons of the Inquisition. No appeal seems to have been made against so cruel a sentence; and neither in remonstrance nor in derision does an individual voice seem to have been raised. The master spirits of the age looked with sullen indifference on the persecution of exalted genius; and Galileo lay in chains, deserted and unpitied. This unrebuked triumph of his enemies was perhaps favourable to the object of their vengeance. Resistance might have heightened the rigour of a sentence, which submission seems to have alleviated. The interference of some eminent individuals of Rome, among whom we have no doubt that the Grand-duke of Tuscany was the most influential, induced Pope Urban VIII., not only to shorten the period, but to soften the rigour of Galileo’s imprisonment. From the dungeon of the Inquisition, where he had remained only four days, he was transported to the ambassador’s palace in the Garden de Medici at Rome; and when his health had begun to suffer, he was permitted to leave the metropolis; and would have been allowed to return to Florence, but as the plague raged in that city, he was sent, in July, 1633, to the archiepiscopal palace of Sienna, the residence of the Archbishop Piccolimini, where he carried on and completed his valuable investigations respecting the resistance of solids. Here he continued five months, when, in consequence of the disappearance of the plague at Florence, he was allowed to retire to his villa at Bellosguardo, and afterward to that of Arcetri in the vicinity of Florence.