Pisa also contains antiquities; the most remarkable is a brick building, said to have been used as a vapor bath; now, however, the floor was covered with oranges."

Several palaces, and the Loggia de' Mercanti, are worthy of notice. An edifice is still shown as the tower of famine, in which Ugolino della Gherardesca perished, in 1283, with his children. The original tower, however, no longer exists, but the family of Gherardesca was extant at Pisa in 1798. The university is old, and has always possessed celebrated professors. The observatory and the garden are in the best condition. There are in the city an academia Italiana, a physico-medical college, cabinets of art, and, in the vicinity, an agricultural establishment. The refinement and kindness of the inhabitants make a residence in Pisa delightful to a stranger. At a little distance from the city, at the foot of Monte S. Giuliano, and named after this mountain, are the Pisan baths. Twelve warm sulphur springs are enclosed in large, convenient buildings, in which provision is made for all the wants of the visiters. The baths are not, however, in so high repute as they were in the middle of the last century. The splendid Carthusian monastery near Pisa is also worth seeing. The trade and manufactures of the place are of little importance. Large quantities of oil, which is but little inferior in quality to the oil of Lucca, is made here; the fields and hills are well cultivated, and the marble quarries in the neighborhood are among the finest in Italy.

Pisa was a flourishing republic in the middle ages, and owed its prosperity to the great love of liberty, and the active commercial spirit, which distinguished its citizens. From the Saracens the republic conquered Sardinia, Corsica, and the Beleares, and was styled the queen of the seas. Its territory on the Tyrrhene shore comprehended the Maremma from Lerici to Piombino, which was at that time cultivated and very fruitful. By sea the rival of Venice and Genoa, she founded colonies in the Levant, and sent forty ships to aid the king of Jerusalem. Faithful as a zealous Gibeline to the emperor, involved in a bloody struggle with the Guelfic Florence, with Lucca and Sienna, which adhered to the pope, an object of jealousy to all her neighbors, overcome by Genoa in a bloody naval battle, and torn by the internal dissensions of powerful families, she finally sunk under the jealousy and hatred of Florence. Ugolino, however, reigned but a short time over the city, which had been stripped of her fortresses. The courage with which 11,000 Pisans preferred to suffer sixteen years of severe imprisonment rather than surrender a fortified place to the enemy, sustained for a time the spirit of the republic, which, with its own arms, defeated the army of the Guelfs of all Italy. But, being exhausted, it finally put itself under the protection of Milan, and was soon after sold to Duke Galeazzo Visconti, from whose successors Florence obtained it by purchase, in 1406. The city was compelled to surrender by famine; and those disposed to resist were kept in obedience by force. The larger part of the citizens emigrated. But after eightyeight years of oppression, when Charles VIII. of France made an expedition into Italy, the ancient pride of Pisa was aroused, and, for fifteen years, she fought gloriously for her liberty. Simon Orlandi called his fellow-citizens to arms, and the people, under the protection of Charles VIII., who took possession of Pisa by a treaty with Florence, adopted a constitution of their own. Then began an obstinate war between Florence and Pisa. The inhabitants of the latter city, with the aid of the French garrison, reconquered the ancient territory, and defeated the Florentine mercenaries. Their courage foiled every effort of their former sovereigns. When the French garrison departed, they took the oath of allegiance to the French king as their protector. Pisa now became a place of importance. Princes and republics negotiated, some for, some against the continuance of the revived republic. Abandoned at last by all, the Pisans swore to perish rather than submit to their hereditary ene my. Florence had already made itself master of the Pisan territory, and, on the last of July, 1499, the siege of the city was commenced with such ardor, that, in a fortnight, the Florentines hoped to have it in their power. But the females of Pisa worked day and night to repair the walls; and the enemy having taken a castle by storm, they exhorted their disheartened citizens to die rather than become the slaves of the Florentines. By this spirit the city was saved, and the enemy, after great loss, raised the siege. The Pisans now changed their city into a formidable fortress. Even an army sent by Louis XII., king of France (who wished to subjugate Pisa for the Florentines), besieged it in vain. In 1504, the Florentines resumed the siege of Pisa. They attempted to dam up the Arno above the city, but had to relinquish the plan after great expense. A third siege, in 1505, was equally unavailing. The city

was finally (June 8, 1509) reduced by famine, and submitted to the Florentines, with an amnesty for the past. Thus Pisa, having frustrated four attacks, and asserted its freedom for fifteen years, fell into the power of the Florentines, and ceased for ever to be independent. On its ruins was founded the power of Tuscany.

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Among the distinguished men born at Pisa was the celebrated Galileo Galilei, who was born in 1564. His family, which, till the middle of the fourteenth century, had borne the name of Bonajuti, was ancient and noble, but not wealthy; and his father, Vincenzo Galilei, appears to have been a person of very superior talents and accomplishments. He is the author of several treatises upon music, which show him to have been master both of the theory and practice of that art. Galileo was the eldest of a family of six children, three sons and three daughters. His boyhood, like that of Newton, and of many other distinguished cultivators of mathematical and physical science, evinced the natural bent of his genius by various mechanical contrivances which he produced; and he also showed a strong predilection and decided talent both for music and painting. It was resolved, however, that he should be educated for the medical profession and with that view he was, in 1581, entered at the university of his native town. He appears to have applied himself, for some time, to the study of medicine. We have an interesting evidence of the degree in which his mind was divided between this new pursuit and its original turn for mechanical observation and invention, in the history of his first great discovery, that of the isochronism (or equal-timedness, as it might be translated) of the vibrations of the pendulum. The suspicion of this curious and most important fact was first suggested to Galileo while he was attending college, by the motions of a lamp swinging from the roof of the cathedral. It immediately occurred to him that here was an excellent means of ascertaining the rate of the pulse; and, accordingly, after he had verified the matter by experiment, this was the first, and for a long time the only, application which he made of his discovery. He contrived several little instruments for counting the pulse by the vibrations of a pendulum, which soon came into general use, under the name of pulsilogies; and it was not till after many years that it was employed as a general measure of time. It was probably after this discovery that Galileo began the study of mathematics. From that instant he seemed to have found his true field. So fascinated was he with the beautiful truths of geometry, that his medical books henceforth remained unopened, or were only spread out over his Euclid to hide it from his father, who was at first so much grieved by his son's absorption in his new study, that he positively prohibited him from any longer indulging in it. After some time, however, seeing that his injunctions were insufficient to overcome the strong bias of nature, he yielded the point, and Galileo was permitted to take his own way. Having mastered Euclid, he now proceeded to read the Hydrostatics of Archimedes; after studying which he produced his first mathematical work, an Essay on the Hydrostatical Balance. His reputation soon spread itself abroad; and he was introduced to one of the ablest of the Italian mathematicians of that day, Guido Ubaldi, who, struck with his extraordinary knowledge and talents, recommended him to the good offices of his brother, the Cardinal del Monte; and by the latter he was made known to the then Grand-Duke Ferdinand. The road to distinction was now open to him. In 1589 he was appointed to the office of lecturer on mathematics in the university of Pisa; and this situation he retained till 1592, when he was nominated by the republic of Venice to be professor of mathematics for six years in their university of Padua. From the moment at which he received the first of these appointments, Galileo gave himself up entirely to science; and, although his salary at first was not large, and he was consequently, in order to eke out his income, obliged to devote a great part of his time to private teaching, in addition to that consumed by his public duties, his incessant activity enabled him to accomplish infinitely more than most other men would have been able to overtake in a life of uninterrupted leisure. The whole range of natural philosophy, as then existing, engaged his attention; and besides reading, observation, and experiment, the composition of numerous dissertations on his favorite subjects occupied his laborious days and nights. In 1598 he was reappointed to his professorship, with an increased salary; and in 1606 he was nominated for the third time, with an additional augmentation. By this time he was so popular as a lecturer, and was attended by such throngs of auditors, that it is said he was frequently obliged to adjourn from the largest hall in the university, which held a thousand persons, to the open air. Among the services which he had already rendered to science may be mentioned his contrivance of an

instrument for finding proportional lines, similar to Gunter's scale, and his rediscov ery of the thermometer, which seems to have been known to some of the ancient philosophers, but had long been entirely forgotten. But the year 1609 was the most momentous in the career of Galileo as an enlarger of the bounds of natural philoso phy. It was in this year that he made his grand discovery of the telescope-having been induced to turn his attention to the effect of a combination of magnifying-glasses, by a report which was brought to him, while on a visit at Venice, of a wonderful instrument constructed on some such principle, which had been sent to Italy from Holland. In point of fact, it appears that a rude species of telescope had been previously fabricated in that country; but Galileo, who had never seen this contrivance, was undoubtedly the true and sole inventor of the instrument in that form in which alone it could be applied to any scientific use. The interest excited by this discovery transcended all that has ever been inspired by any of the other wonders of science. After having exhibited his new instrument for a few days, Galileo presented it to the senate of Venice, who immediately re-elected him to his professorship for life, and doubled his salary, making it now one thousand florins. He then constructed another telescope for himself, and with that proceeded to examine the heavens. He had not long directed it to this, the field which has ever since been its principal domain, before he was rewarded with a succession of brilliant discoveries. The four satellites or attendant moons of Jupiter revealed themselves for the first time to the human eye. Other stars unseen before met him in every quarter of the heavens to which he turned. Saturn showed his singular encompassing ring. The moon unveiled her seas and her mountains. The sun himself discovered spots of dark lying in the midst of his brightness. All these wonders were announced to the world by Galileo in the successive numbers of a publication which he entitled the "Nuncius Sidereus, or Intelligence of the Heavens," a newspaper undoubtedly unrivalled for extraordinary tidings by any other that has ever appeared. In 1610 he was induced to resign his professorship at Padua, on the invitation of the grand-duke of Tuscany to accept of the appointment of his first mathematician and philosopher at Pisa. Soon after his removal thither, Galileo appears to have for the first time ventured upon openly teaching the Copernican system of the world, of the truth of which he had been

many years before convinced. This bold step drew down upon the great philosopher a cruel and disgraceful persecution which terminated only with his life. An outcry was raised by the ignorant bigotry of the time, on the ground that in maintaining the doctrine of the earth's motion round the sun he was contradicting the language of scripture, where, it was said, the earth was constantly spoken of as at rest. The day is gone by when it would have been necessary to attempt any formal refutation of this absurd notion, founded as it is upon a total misapprehension of what the object of the Scriptures is, which are intended to teach men morality and religion only, not mathematics or astronomy, and which would not have been even intelligible to those to whom they were first addressed, unless their language in regard to this and various other matters had been accommodated to the then universally prevailing opinions. In Galileo's day, however, the church of Rome had not learned to admit this. very obvious consideration. In 1616, Galileo, having gone to Rome on learning the hostility which was gathering against him, was graciously received by the pope, but was commanded to abstain in future from teaching the doctrines of Copernicus. For some years the matter was allowed to sleep, till in 1632 the philosopher published his celebrated Dialogue on the two Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican, in which he took but little pains to disguise his thorough conviction of the truth of the latter. The rage of his enemies, who had been so long nearly silent, now burst upon him in a terrific storm. The book was consigned to the inquisition, before which formidable tribunal the author was forthwith summoned to appear. He arrived at Rome on the 14th of February, 1633. We have not space to relate the history of the process. It is doubtful whether or not Galileo was actually put to the torture, but it is certain that on the 21st of June he was found guilty of heresy, and condemned to abjuration and imprisonment. His actual confinement in the dungeons of the Holy Office lasted only a few days; and after some months he was allowed to return to his country-seat at Arcetri, near Florence, with a prohibition, however, against quitting that retirement, or even admitting the visits of his friends. Galileo survived this treatment for several years, during which he continued the active pursuit of his philosophical studies, and even sent to the press another important work, his Dialogues on the Laws of Motion. The rigor of his confinement, too, was after some time much relaxed; and although he never again left Arcetri (except once for a few months), he was permitted to enjoy the society of his friends in his own house. But other misfortunes now crowded upon his old age. His health had long been bad, and his fits of illness were now more frequent and painful than ever. 1639 he was struck with total blindness. A few years before, the tie that bound him most strongly to life had been snapped by the death of his favorite daughter; weighed down by these accumulated sorrows, on the 8th of January, 1642, the old man breathed his last at the advanced age of seventy-eight.

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LEGHORN is a seaport town on the western coast of Italy, in the grand duchy of Tuscany. This town was almost entirely built by Ferdinand I., and afterward greatly improved by Cosmo II. The activity and bustle of this small place (which is not above two miles in circumference) are amazing. The streets, especially La Via Grande, are generally so crowded that travellers can with difficulty pass through them; and Jews, Turks, Armenians, &c., are everywhere seen in collision with each other. A large canal unites Leghorn with the city of Pisa, which greatly facilitates the commercial affairs of the inhabitants. The principal object that merits attention in regard to sculpture is the celebrated pedestrian statue of Ferdinand I., in marble, with the four Turkish slaves in bronze chained to the pedestal, who attempting to steal a Tuscan vessel, were executed by order of this prince: they are all larger than life, and remarkably well done, particularly the slaves, whose countenances are marked with a savage ferocity. The harbor of Leghorn is not so good as that of Genoa or of Marseilles, but is capable of containing vessels of three hundred tons burden. There is an outer and inner harbor; on the right is La Fontarezza Vecchia, in which the galley slaves are lodged; these men are employed in the harbor or on shore, as occasion requires, with a chain to their legs, and sometimes two are chained together; when their crimes are heinous they are chained to the vessel in which they work.

The church of the Dominicans has a large dome and cupola in the centre, formerly painted but now plain. Over the high altar is the history of St. Catherine, painted by a Livornese. In a chapel on the left is a curious recess, containing a representation of the stable in which Christ was born, with the Virgin and many figures; in

the stable are cows, &c., and the whole has a very natural appearance. There are also in this church a number of recesses, each containing a figure of the Redeemer in various stages of his Passion.

The next place which particularly demands attention is the English buryingground. This spot is about half a mile from the town, and enclosed with a handsome balustrade and railing, and no spot of its size can contain a greater number of elegant monuments and tombstones with inscriptions in various languages, as the subjects are of various nations, English, German, Swedes, Danes, &c., so that it may with more propriety be called the protestant, than the English burying-ground: among other inscriptions, is one in Italian, on Margaret Rolle, countess of Orford and baroness of Clinton; this illustrious female died at Pisa, January 13, 1781. Here, in short, are confounded in one common mass, the nobleman and the merchant, . mechanic and artist, husband and wife, father and child, especially the inhabitants of Smyrna, Aleppo, Constantinople, &c., arrested in their trading career by the cold and unsparing hand of death.

Among the useful works at Leghorn, the aqueduct may be reckoned the first, which brings from the mountain Colognole, distant twelve miles, an excellent supply of good water. The aqueduct is about three miles from Leghorn, and that from the water is conducted under ground, covered over with arched brickwork. The new baths of Leghorn are finished with marble, at a great expense, and are well worth seeing; they are between twenty and thirty in number. Near them is the gate of St. Mark, which is very handsome. The Greek protestant church consists of a nave and small choir enclosed as in that of Græci Uniti. The roof is ornamented, and there is a considerable amount of gilding in various parts of this church. The sacramental vessels are very rich.

FLORENCE is the capital of the grand duchy of Tuscany, and one of the most celebrated cities of Europe. It owes much to the beauty of its situation, combined with the treasures of art which it contains, particularly in the departments of architecture and painting, aided by the remarkable historical events of which it has been the theatre. In viewing this far-famed city, with its magnificent edifices, fine architecture, and antique buildings, rising in dark and imposing beauty, its bridges, and its noble river, watering, as far as the eye can reach, the vale of the lovely Arno, the mind insensibly wanders back, and recals the days when turbulence and bloody feuds raged within its walls; when, on the surrounding amphitheatre of hills, now luxuriant with the olive and the vine, and richly studded with peaceful dwellings, stood proudly frowning the castellated towers of the feudal chiefs, who were at once the terror and protection of the city. Of these towers scarcely a trace now remains; but to this day Florence bears the aspect of a city filled with nobles-a city of churches and palaces.

Florence is divided into two unequal parts by the Arno, over which there are four bridges, one of which, the Trinity, is entirely built of white marble, and is much admired for the lightness and beauty of its appearance. The quay, with the buildings on each side, and the bridges through which the river flows, renders that part of the city by far the most attractive. Among its numerous palaces is the Palazzo Vecchio, which is adorned with a tower so lofty that it is deemed a chef-d'œuvre of architecture. It was built by Arnolfo, the disciple of Cimabue: and, before the entrance to this palace, is a statue in marble, of David, supposed to be in the act of slaying Goliath, by Buonaroti; and a group, likewise, in marble, of Hercules slaying Cacus, by Bandinelli. On the ceiling and walls of the great hall are frescoes of the most celebrated actions of the Florentine Republic and the house of Medicis, all by Vasari; except four pictures in oil, one representing the coronation of Cosimo I., by Ligozzi; another, the twelve Florentines, at the same time ambassadors from different states to Boniface VIII., by Ligozzi; a third, the election of Cosimo I., by Cigoli; and, a fourth, the institution of the order of San Stefano, by Passignano. In this hall, likewise, is a group of Victory with a prisoner at her feet, by Buonaroti; and another group of Virtue triumphing over Vice, by Giovanni di Bologna. The exploits of Furius Camillus are painted in tempera, by Salviati, in the Sala dell' Udienza Vecchia.

The Loggia of the Palazzo Vecchio was built after the design of Andrea Arcagna; and is adorned with a group, in bronze, called Judith and Holofernes, by Donatello -Perseus with Medusa's head, in bronze, by Cellini (the basso-relievo on the pedestal which supports this group is much admired), a group in marble, of a young Roman