[Footnote 149: "While they avoid one mistake, they run into the contrary.">[
And thus they disagree amongst themselves, old and new, irreconcilable in their opinions; thus Aristarchus, thus Hipparchus, thus Ptolemaeus, thus Albateginus, thus Alfraganus, thus Tycho, thus Ramerus, thus Raeslinus, thus Fracastorius, thus Copernicus and his adherents," etc.
Not a word here of Galileo.
The whole chapter is very curious, and will well repay the trouble of reading. See pages 323 to 329, London edition.
Notwithstanding his condition of paradox as seen by disinterested men of science, Galileo claimed three propositions as settled:
First. The system was demonstrated.
Second. He demonstrated it.
Third. His was the honor of furnishing the demonstration from the flux and reflux of the tides.
To these three propositions it is replied that the system was not at that day demonstrated by Galileo or by any one else, and that his tidal argument was worthless.
Indeed, a sufficient answer is found in the simple statement, in which all astronomers must certainly accord, that before the time of Sir Isaac Newton there was nothing to make the Copernican system more plausible and reasonable than the Ptolemaic theory, because the English astronomer first explained the one law on which planetary revolutions depended.
The theory of the earth's rotation was, in 1633, barely a matter of induction—strong, it is true, yet nothing more than induction. Strong, if the two arguments taken from the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter are duly weighed; but weak without them.