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tencc against him ami his books, obliging him to abjure his errorsin the most solemn manner; committed him to the prison of theirotlice during pleasure; and enjoined him, as a saving penance, forthree years, to repeat once a-week the seven penitential psalms:reserving to themselves, however, the power of moderating,changing, or taking away altogether, or in part, the above-men-tioned punishment and penance. On this sentence, he was de-tained a prisoner till 16.54: and his Dialogues of the System ofthe World were burnt at Rome. He lived ten years after this,seven of which were employed in making still further discoverieswith his telescope. Rut by the continual application to that in-strument, added to the damage he received in his sight from thenocturnal air, his eyes grew gradually weaker, till he became to-tally blind in I6J9. lie bore this calamity with patience and re-signation, worthy of a great philosopher. The loss neither brokehis spirit, nor hindered the course of his studies. He supplied tindefect by constant meditation: whereby lie prepared a large■quantity of materials, and began to dictate bis own conceptions;when, wasting away by degrees, he expired at Arcetti near Flo-rence, in January, 1642j N. S. aged 78. His discoveries andwritings have rendered essential service to philosophy. From thetime of Archimedes , as M. Leibnitz observed, there had been no-thing done in mechanical geometry, till Galileo , who possessingan excellent judgement, and great skill in the most abstruse pointsof geometry, first extended the boundaries of that science, andbegan to reduce the resistance of solid bodies to its laws. As ob-served by Dr. Hutton, “ He made the evidence of the Coperni-can system more sensible, when he shewed from the phases of Ve-nus , like to the monthly phases of the moon, that Venus actuallyrevolves about the sun. lie proved the revolution of the sun onhis axis, from his spots; and thence the diurnal rotation of theearth became more credible. The four satellites that attendedJupiter, in his revolution about the sun, represented, in Jupiter ’sless system, a just image of the great Solar System , and renderedit more easy to conceive how the moon might attend the earth, asa satellite, in her annual revolution. By discovering hills and ca-vities in the moon, and spots in the sun constantly varying, lieshewed that there was not so great a difference between celestialand sublunary bodies as the philosophers had vainly imagined.

“ He rendered no less service to science by treating, in a cleatand geometrical manner, the doctrine of motion, which has beenjustly called the key of nature. The rational part of mechanicshad been so much neglected, that scarcely any improvement wasmade in it for almost 2000 years; but Galileo has given us fullythe theory of equable motions, and of such as are uniformly acce-lerated or retarded, and of these two compounded together.Fie first demonstrated, that the spaces described by heavy bodiesfrom the beginning of their descent, are as the squares of the times;and that a body, projected in any direction that is not perpendicu-lar to the horizon, describes a parabola. These were the begin-nings of the doctrine of the motion of heavy bodies, which hasbeen since carried to so great a height by Sir Isaac Newton . Ingeometry, he invented the cycloid, or trochoid, though the pro-perties of it were afterwards chiefly demonstrated by his pupilTorricelli . lie invented the simple pendulum, and made use ofit in his astronomical experiments: he had also thoughts of apply-ing it to clocks, but did not execute that design. The glory ofthat invention was reserved for his son Vincenzo, who made the ex-periment at Venice in 1649; and Huygens afterwards carried theinvention to perfection. Of Galileo ’s invention also was the ma-chine with which the Venetians render their laguna fluid and navi-gable. Me also discovered the gravity of the air, and endeavour-ed to compare it with that of water; and opened several other in-quiries in natural philosophy. He was not esteemed and followedbv philosophers only; but was honoured by persons of the greatestdistinction of all nations. Galileo had scholars worthy of so greata master, by whom the gravitation of the atmosphere was fullyestablished, and its varying pressure accurately and convenientlymeasured, by the column of quicksilver of equal weight sustainedby it in the barometrical tube. The elasticity of the air, by whichit perpetually endeavours to expand itself, and while it admits ofcondensation, resists in proportion to its density, was a phenome-non of a new kind, (the common fluids having no such property),and of the utmost importance to philosophy. These principlesopened a vast field of new and useful knowledge, and explained a'

great variety of phenomena, which had been accounted for in anabsurd manner before that time. It seemed as if the air, the fluidin which men lived from the beginning, had been then first disco-vered. Philosophers were every where busy, enquiring into thevarious properties and their effects; and valuable discoveries re-warded tluir industry. Of the great number who distinguishedthemselves on this occasion, we cannot hut mention Torricelli andViviani, in Italv; Pascal, in France; Otto Guricke, in Germany ;and Boyle, in iingland.” Galileo wrote a number of treatises, ofwhich the principal published during his life-time were, “ ATreatise on Mechanics,” “ On the Balance,” and “ Dialogues onthe Solar System ;” “The Operations of the Compass, geometricaland military,” lG06; “ A Discourse, addressed to the Most Se-rene Cosmo II. Grand Duke of Tuscany , concerning the Swim-ming of Bodies upon, and their Submersion in, Water,” 1012;“ Nuncitis Sidereus,” 1010, of which a “ Continuation,” or “AnEssay on the History of Galileo ’s last Observations on Saturn,Mars, Venus , and the Sun, &c.” was afterwards collected fromletters between Galileo and his correspondents; “A Letter Con-cerning the Trepidation of the Moon , lately discovered, inscribedto Alphonso Antonini, with Antouini’s Answer,” 1638; “ A Dis-course of the Solar Spots, &c. w ith Predictions and Ephemerides of the Medicean Planets,” 1613; the famous Italian piece, enti-tled, “ II Saggiatore,” written in defence of Guiducci ’s “ Dis-course on Comets,” and containing a complete account of thephysiology and astronomy of our author, printed in 1623; “ALetter to Prince Leopold of Tuscany , Examining the fiftiethchapter of Licelus’s Letheosphoros; “A Letter to ChristopherGreinbergerus, Concerning the Montuosity of the Moon, ” 1611 ;“Mathematical Discourses and Demonstrations Concerning twonew Sciences, Relating to Mechanics and Local Motions, toge-ther with an Appendix Concerning the Centre of Gravity in someSolids, 1638, &c. The preceding articles, together with someother treatises, written cither by Galileo , or by some of his disci-ples, in defence of his doctrines and observations, were collectedand published by Menolcssi, in 1636, under the title of “ L’Operdde Galileo Galilei Lynceo, nohile Fiorentino,” &c. in two vo-lumes quarto. Several of these pieces were translated into Eng-lish , and published by Thomas Salisbury, in his “ MathematicalCollections,” in two vols. folio. A volume also of his “ Letters”to several learned men, and solutions of a variety of problems, werepublished at Bologna, in quarto. His last disciple, Vincenzo Vi-viani , who proved a very eminent mathematician, methodised apiece of his master’s, and published it under the title of “ QuintoLibro de gli Element! d' Euclid, ”&c. 1674, quarto; and he alsojublishcd some other pieces of Galileo , including extracts fromns “ Letters to a Learned Frenchman,” in which the author givesan account of the works which he intended to have published, andan extract of a letter to John Camillo, a mathematician of Naples,concerning the angle of contact. Many other of Galileo ’s writingswere unfortunately lost to the world, owing to the superstition ofthose to whom they were left.

GA LI PAGO Isles, several uninhabited islands in the SouthSea, on both sides of the equator, near Terra Firma, belongingto Spain . Lon. between 83, 40. and 89. 30. V. Lat. from 3° to

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GALITSCH, a town of Russia, in Kostrom , 56 miles E. N. £•of Kostrom .

GALIUM, in botany, a genus of the ntonogynia order, andtetrandria class of plants ; natural order, Slellatic. Corolla mono*petalous, plain; seeds two, roundish. There are forty-eightspecies.

G. ArFRixE, CuvEits, or Goose-Grass, has a square, veryrough, jointed, weak stem, two, three, or four feet long, and ad-hesive : the branches are opposite ; the joints hairy at the base:the seeds are rough ; flowers white, small, few, on slender foot-stalks on the tops of the branches. It is common in fields by thesides of hedges, &c. The expressed juice of this plant taken in-ternally, and (he bruised leaves applied by way of poultice, arcsaid to have been used with success as a cure for the cancer.

G, Veuum, the Yeleow Lady’s Bed-straw, has a firm,erect, brown, square, stem ; the leaves generally eight in eachwhirl, linear, pointed, brittle, and often reflex ; branches short,generally two from each joint, terminating in spikes of small yel-low flowers. It grows commonly in dry ground, and on road-sides*