It appears never to have occurred to him to test the matter by dropping a stone from the topmast of a ship.

Bezenburg has mathematically demonstrated just such an aberration in falling bodies, as is mathematically required by the diurnal motion of the earth.

See Jevons, Principles of Science, pp.

388, 389, second edition, 1877.
I shall present this warfare at some length because, so far as I can find, no careful summary of it has been given in our language, since the whole history was placed in a new light by the revelations of the trial documents in the Vatican Library, honestly published for the first time by L'Epinois in 1867, and since that by Gebler, Berti, Favaro, and others.
The first important attack on Galileo began in 1610, when he announced that his telescope had revealed the moons of the planet Jupiter.

The enemy saw that this took the Copernican theory out of the realm of hypothesis, and they gave battle immediately.