And so, to drop back to the original proposition, nothing great and sublime is ever done without passion.
Galileo had his mechanical whooping-cough, musical mumps, artistic measles, and now the hectic flush of mathematics burned on his cheeks. He talked and dreamed mathematics.
Ricci became interested in the talented young scholar and remained longer at Pisa than he had intended, that they might sit up all night and surprise the rising sun, discussing beauties of dimensions and the wonders of dynamics.
Together they went to Florence, where Ricci introduced his pupil as a pedagogic sample of the goods, just as Booker Washington usually takes with him on his travels a few ebony homo bricks as his specimens from Tuskegee.
The beauty and the grace of Galileo's speech and presence put the abstract Ricci in the shadow. The right man can make anything interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, Hamlet to the contrary, notwithstanding.
Galileo knew the Florentine heart, and so he gave lectures on a Florentine: one Dante, who loved a girl named Beatrice.
The young Pisan drew diagrams of Dante's Inferno--and surely it was nobody's else. He gave its size, height, weight, and told how to reach it.
He gave lectures on the Hydrostatic Balance and the Centers of Gravity, and then published them as serials.
The Florentines crowned him with bay and enthusiastically proclaimed him, "The Modern Archimedes."
Pisa now put forth efforts to have her gifted son come home. There was always rivalry between Pisa and Florence. Pisa could not afford to supply Florence her men of genius--let her depend upon production from home, or go without.
Galileo became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa, a life position, or at least one he could hold during good behavior.
One of the time-honored dictums of the day was that falling bodies fell with a velocity proportioned to their weight. The question was first thrashed out in the classroom; and after Galileo had slyly gotten all of these scientific wiseacres to commit themselves, he invited them, with their students, to the Leaning Tower.
Then he proved by ocular demonstrations that they were positively wrong.