[Footnote 126: The largest telescopes we now have are at Cincinnati, 204 focal feet: Greenwich, (England,) 210; Cambridge, (Mass.,) 270; Pultowa, (Russia,) 289; E. Cooper, (private observatory, Ireland,) 302. Auzont (Paris) is said to have made one of 600 focal feet, but it was found to be unmanageable.]
These embryo telescopes were from twenty to thirty inches in length. Now, from a mere portable toy which Galileo held in his hand, this instrument has become an immense construction capable of supporting the astronomer himself, and which complicated and powerful machinery is requisite to move.
It is a remarkable fact that, as late as 1637, no glasses could be produced in Holland, the cradle of the telescope, capable of showing the satellites of Jupiter, which, in our day, can be discerned with a good field or opera-glass.
With his baby-telescope, then, in 1610, Galileo discovered the irregularities or mountains of the moon, forty stars in the Pleiades, and the satellites of Jupiter. These discoveries were announced in a work bearing the appropriate title, The Herald of the Skies, (Nuncius Sidereus;) and it would be difficult to describe the profound sensation this publication created. Kepler, in a letter to Galileo, describes his impressions on hearing of the discovers of the satellites of Jupiter in the following graphic manner: "Wachenfels stopped his carriage at my door to tell me, when such a fit of wonder seized me at a report which seemed so absurd that, between his joy, my coloring, and the laughter of both, confounded as we were by such a novelty, we were hardly capable, he of speaking, or I of listening."
Galileo Goes To Rome.
Galileo visited Rome for the first time in 1611. His fame had preceded him, and his stay there was one long ovation. Attentions beset him and honors were heaped upon him. "Whether we consider cardinal, priest, or prelate," says Salsbury, "he found an honorable welcome from all, and had their palaces as open to him as the houses of his private friends." His reception was indeed, as was beautifully remarked, "as though one of his own starry wonders had dropped from the sky."
He erected his best telescope in the garden of Cardinal Bandini, and for weeks all classes, priest and layman, noble and plebeian, flocked to see the wonders for the first time given to human gaze.
In 1611 and 1612, he had a protracted controversy, and wrote treatises on the question whether "the shape of bodies has any influence on their disposition to float or sink in a fluid," and displayed much acute reasoning in support of the true principles of hydrostatics.
His Success.