The Faber Book of Science (5 page)
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Authors: John Carey
Accordingly, on January 11th I saw an arrangement of the following kind, namely, only two stars to the east of Jupiter, the nearer of which was distant from Jupiter three times as far as from the star further to the east; and the star furthest to the east was nearly twice as large as the other one; whereas on the previous night they had appeared nearly of equal magnitude. I therefore concluded, and decided unhesitatingly,
that there are three stars in the heavens moving about Jupiter, as Venus and Mercury round the Sun; which at length was established as clear as daylight by numerous other subsequent observations. These observations also established that there are not only three, but four, erratic sidereal bodies performing their revolutions round Jupiter, observations of whose changes of position made with more exactness on succeeding nights the following account will supply …
Galileo’s discoveries shattered old beliefs. The mountains and craters on the moon showed that the celestial bodies were not perfect spheres, as had always been thought. The thousands of new stars brought home the littleness of our world, lost in space. Afraid of what he would see, the Professor of Philosophy at Padua refused even to look into Galileo’s telescope. Further, the four new ‘planets’ around Jupiter meant that astrology was false, since it had not taken the influence of these bodies into account. The English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton pointed this out when he wrote from Venice to the Earl of Salisbury on 13 March 1610, enclosing a copy of Galileo’s book.
Now touching the occurrents of the present, I send herewith unto his Majesty the strangest piece of news (as I may justly call it) that he hath ever yet received from any part of the world; which is the annexed book (come abroad this very day) of the Mathematical Professor at Padua, who by the help of an optical instrument (which both enlargeth and approximated the object) invented first in Flanders, and bettered by himself, hath discovered four new planets rolling about the sphere of Jupiter, besides many other unknown and lastly, that the moon is not spherical but endued with many prominences, and, which is of all the strangest, illuminated with the solar light by reflection from the body of the earth, as he seemeth to say. So as upon the whole subject he hath first overthrown all former astronomy and next all astrology. For the virtue of these new planets must needs vary the judicial part, and why may there not be yet more?
Galileo became an instant celebrity. He christened the moons of Jupiter ‘the Medicean planets’ after Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, who became his patron. Invited to Rome in triumph, he was received in audience by Pope Paul V, who refused to let him kneel, and at a grand banquet in his honour his optical instrument was dignified by the Greek name ‘telescope’ – a title conferred by the Marquis of Monticelli.
Though Galileo had been a convinced Copernican from his early years, he
had tactfully said little about the Copernican system in
The
Starry
Messenger.
But he became less guarded with time, and the Church, awakening to the danger of the new ideas, became less tolerant. In 1632, when he published his Copernican
Dialogue
on
the
Two
Chief
World
Systems,
he was brought to trial before the Inquisition, found guilty, and sentenced to an indefinite term of imprisonment. Under threat of torture, he made a public abjuration.
I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, arraigned personally before this tribunal and kneeling before you, Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals Inquisitors-General against heretical pravity throughout the entire Christian
commonwealth
, having before my eyes and touching with my hands the Holy Gospels, swear that I have always believed, do believe, and by God’s help will in the future believe all that is held, preached, and taught by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. But, whereas – after an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Holy Office to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable and that the Earth is not the center of the world and moves and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever‚ verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture – I wrote and printed a book in which I discuss this new doctrine already condemned and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favour without presenting any solution of these, I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable and that the Earth is not the center and moves.
Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this vehement suspicion justly conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies and generally every other error, heresy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the Holy Church, and I swear that in future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but, should I know any heretic or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office.
Confined in a secluded house at Arcetri, near Florence, the old and now blind Galileo was visited, two years before his death, by the young English poet,
John Milton, who recalled the meeting in his classic defence of press freedom
Areopagitica
(1644): ‘There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner of the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.’ In
Paradise
Lost
Milton compares the fallen Satan’s huge shield, dimly seen amid the murk of Hell, to the strange giant moon that Galileo (‘the Tuscan artist’) first saw through his telescope from the hills of Fiesole (‘Fesole’) or from the valley of the Arno (‘Valdarno’) where Florence stands:
the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe.
However, the universe in Milton’s epic is the old earth-centred one, and when Adam asks a visiting angel for an astronomy lesson he is told that God has deliberately put such matters as whether the earth moves round the sun beyond men’s grasp:
He his fabric of the heavens
Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide.
Sources:
The
Sidereal
Messenger
of
Galileo
Galilei,
ed. and trans. Edward Strafford Carlos, London, Rivingtons, 1880, and
The
Life
and
Letters
of
Sir
Henry
Wotton,
ed. Logan Pearsall Smith, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907.
In 1612 the poet John Donne wrote:
Knows’t thou how blood, which to the heart doth flow,
Doth from one ventricle to the other go?
This was a rhetorical question – for no one did know. A common idea was that the central division of the heart (the septum) had holes through which the blood passed – though Vesalius had shown it had not. William Harvey (1578–1657), who probably knew Donne, solved this mystery with his discovery of the circulation of the blood. He was already lecturing about this at the College of Physicians in London in 1615, though he did not publish it until 1628. Even then, he records, many medical experts thought his great discovery ‘crack-brained’, and some, like René Descartes, stuck to the idea that the heart was a kind of furnace rather than, as Harvey had shown, a pump made of muscle.
As private physician to Charles I, Harvey looked after the two royal princes at the Battle of Edgehill, during which he sat under a hedge reading a book. His royal appointment also involved him in the affair of the Lancashire witches, recounted here by his biographer Geoffrey Keynes, which illustrates the gradual advance of science over superstition in the seventeenth century.
It was in 1633 that the events took place in Pendle Forest near Burnley in Lancashire that led to Harvey’s being called as a witness in the following year. This remote area in the north-west had been for some years agitated by a series of crimes attributed to witches, gossip leading to fanciful accusations conceived in the fertile brains of imaginative children or even taught them by their elders. The particular story that ultimately concerned Harvey began on 10 February 1633. A boy of 11 named Edmund Robinson made an elaborate deposition before two Justices of the Peace, Richard Shutleworth and John Starkey, at Padiham, alleging that on All Saints Day last (1 November 1632) he was gathering wild plums in Wheatley Lane, when he saw two greyhounds, one brown the other black,
running in his direction over the next field. Each dog, he noticed, had a collar which ‘did shine like gold’, but though each had a string attached there was no one with them. At the same moment he saw a hare, and, thinking to set the dogs off after it, cried ‘Loo, loo, loo’, but they would not run. This angered him, and tying them by their strings to a bush, he beat them with a stick. Thereupon the black dog stood up in the person of the wife of one Dickenson, and the brown dog as a small boy he did not know. In his fright Robinson made to run away, but was stopped by the woman, who, producing a silver coin from her pocket, offered to give it to him if he would hold his tongue. This he refused, saying, ‘Nay, thou art a witch’. She then pulled from her pocket a sort of bridle that jingled, put it on the head of the boy that had been a dog, who then turned into a white horse. Seizing young Robinson, the woman mounted him on the horse in front of her and rode with him to a house called Hoarstones, a locality well known as a gathering place for witches. Many other people then came riding up on horses of various colours to the number of about threescore, and meat was roasted. A young woman tried to make him eat some of this and to drink something out of a glass, but he refused after the first taste of it. He then saw various people go into a neighbouring barn, where six of them kneeled and pulled on ropes fastened to the roof. This brought down smoking flesh, lumps of butter, and milk, which they caught in basins. Then six more people repeated the process, making such fearful faces that he stole out in terror and ran home, where he told his father that he had also seen the woman pricking pictures with thorns. When it was noticed that the boy had escaped, a party of people, several of whom he named, started in pursuit and had nearly caught up with him at a place called Boggard-hole, when two horsemen came up and rescued him. On the same evening Robinson’s father sent him to tie up two cows in their stalls, and on the way, in a field called the Ellers, he met another boy who picked a quarrel and made him fight until his ears were made very bloody. Looking down he saw that the aggressor had a cloven foot, which aroused fresh fears. He ran on to find the cows and saw the light of a lantern; thinking it was carried by friends he ran towards it only to find a woman on a bridge, whom he recognized, and turned back to meet again the boy with the cloven foot, who gave him a blow on the back and made him cry. The boy’s father in confirmation of the story said he had gone to look for him and found him in a state of terror and crying pitifully, so
that he did not recover for nearly a quarter of an hour. In his deposition to the magistrates the boy gave the names of seventeen persons whom he knew as present at Hoarstones and said he could recognize others …
The boy was taken round by his father to various churches in the district and identified many more people among the congregations, money being paid for his services. It so happened that at the church of Kildwick, where he was taken, the curate was David Webster, who in 1677 published an important book,
The
Displaying
of
Supposed
Witchcraft,
exposing the frauds perpetrated in witch-hunts. Webster related that he asked the boy if he had truly seen and heard the strange things that he described, but two ill-favoured men who were in charge of him forbade the boy to answer, saying that he had already been examined by two Justices. As a result of this nearly thirty people were imprisoned, and a variety of other accusations were hurled at them by their enraged neighbours. A trial took place at Lancaster after the prisoners had been searched for any suspicious marks on their bodies, and seventeen were found guilty on this evidence. Great importance was attached to the discovery of marks on witches’ bodies, since it was believed that the devil put his marks on those allied to him, and these places then became callous and insensitive. The law therefore required that the accused should be scrutinized by a jury of the same sex together with one doctor or several. The head was to be shaved and every part of the body handled. Any callous spot that was found was to be pricked with pins, and, if it was insensitive, that was evidence of guilt. Search was also to be made for anything resembling a teat capable of suckling the witch’s familiar or imp, which might take the form of a rat, mouse, frog, toad, bird, fly, or spider; sometimes the imps were in the form of larger animals such as a cat or dog. King James in his
Daemonologie
believed firmly in two ‘good helps that may be used for their triall: the one is, the finding of the marke and the trying the insensibleness thereof: the other is their fleeting on the water’, since those in whom the devil resided were lighter than normal people and so floated when thrown into a pond.
Fortunately for the seventeen Lancashire prisoners found guilty, it was requested that seven of them should be seen by John Bridgeman, Bishop of Chester, in whose diocese they lived. The Bishop went to the gaol, but by then three of them had died and a fourth, Jennet Hargreaves, was very ill. Of the remaining three, two denied all
knowledge of witchcraft, but the third, Margaret Johnson, declared herself to have been a witch for six years. She had stated on 9 March 1633 before the same Justices who had examined Edmund Robinson, that in a fit of anger and discontent a devil had appeared to her in the form of a man ‘apparrelled in a suite of blake, tied about with silk pointes, whoe offered her, if shee would give him her soule, hee would supply all her wantes, and at her appointment would helpe her to kill and revenge her either of men or beeste, or what she desired’. To this she agreed and the devil bade her call him Memillion, and when she called he would be ready to do her will. She denied being at the meeting at Hoarstones on the particular day described by Robinson, but admitted being there on the next Sunday, when various evil plans were concerted. She further declared ‘that such witches as have sharpe boanes are generally for the devil to prick them with which have no papps nor duggs, but raiseth blood from the place pricked with the boane, which witches are more greater and grand witches then they which have papps or duggs’. After further boastings she said that since ‘this trouble befell her, her Spiritt hath left her, and shee never saw him since’.
After his examination the Bishop reported the affair to the Secretary of State, Sir John Coke, and so it came to the ears of King Charles. The King was a less credulous man than his father, and he ordered the Lord Privy Seal, Henry Montagu, Earl of Manchester, to write to the Court doctors as follows:
To Alexander Baker Esq., and Sergiant Clowes his Majesty’s Chirurgions.
These shalbe to will and reqire you forth with to make choise of such Midwives as you shall thinke fitt to inspect and search the Boddies of those women that were lately brought by the Sheriff of the Countie of Lancaster indited for witchcraft and to report unto you whether they finde about them any such markes as are pretended; wherein the said midwives are to receave instructions from Mr Dr Harvey his Majesty’s Physician and yourselves;
Dated at Whytehall the 29th of June 1634.
H. Manchester
The four prisoners, including Jennet Hargreaves, who had now recovered, had been brought to London and were held at the Ship Tavern in Greenwich. They were now examined by the prescribed jury
at Surgeon’s Hall in Monkwell Street, and the following report was returned:
Surgeons Hall in Mugwell Streete London 2
d
July A
o
D
ni
1634 We in humble obeyance to your Lordshipps have this day caled unto us the Chirurgeons and Midwyves whose names are hereunder written who have by the directions of Mr. Doctor Harvey (in our presence and his) made diligent searche and Inspection on those women which weare lately brought upp from Lancaster and ffynd as followeth vidz.
On the bodyes of Jennett Hargreaves, Ffrances Dicconson, and Mary Spencer nothinge unnaturalle neyther in their secrets or any other partes of theire bodyes, nor anythinge lyke a teate or marke nor any Signe that any suche thinge haith ever beene.
On the body of Margaret Johnson wee fynd two things maye be called teats the one betweene her secretts and the ffundament on the edge thereof the other on the middle of her left buttocke. The first in shape lyke to the teate of a Bitche, but in our judgements nothinge but the skin of the ffundament drawen out as yt wilbe after the pyles or applicacion of leeches. The seacond is lyke the nipple or teate of a woman’s breast but of the same colour with the rest of the skin without any hollowness or yssue for any bloode or juyce to come from thence.
| Midwives | |||
| | Margryt Franses | Anna Ashwell | |
| | Aurelia Molins | Ffrancis Palmer | |
| | Amis Willuby | Katheren Manuche | |
| | Rebecke Layne | Clifton | |
| | Sibell Ffellipps | Joane Sensions | |
| Surgeons | |||
| Alexander Read | |||
| | W. Clowes | Rich d Wateson | |
| | Alex. Baker | Ja. Molins | |
| | Ric. Mapes | Henry Blackley | |
This statement, bearing every mark of Harvey’s precise and logical mind, was not signed by himself, Alexander Read having taken his place. As a result four of the seven witches were pardoned by the King, who had himself seen them. Subsequently the boy Robinson, having been brought to London with his father, was re-examined alone and
confessed to being an impostor. His father, he said, and some others had taught him what he was to say with a view to making some money out of the story; in fact at the time of the supposed meeting at Hoarstones he was some distance away gathering plums in another man’s orchard.
Source: Geoffrey Keynes,
The
Life
of
William
Harvey,
London, Oxford University Press, 1966.