SOURCE: "Daniel 5 and the Assayer: Galileo Reads the Handwriting on the Wall," in The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 1-27.

In the following essay, Reeves portrays Galileo's Assayer as a witty and rigorous linguistic attack against scientific ignorance and vanity.

I

In that great catalog of wit and invective which Galileo Galilei published in 1623 as the Assayer, the rather unlikely issue of Babylonian cookery is singled out as particularly deserving of ridicule. The matter arose in the course of the debate over the comets of 1618—the ostensible subject of the Assayer—between Galileo and his opponent Orazio Grassi, S.J., when the latter maintained that motion, not friction, was the cause of heat. Grassi offered as proof several verses from Ovid, Lucan, Lucretius, and Virgil in which arrows were ignited or even melted as they flew through the air; not content with...