She never mentioned the sultan without tears in her eyes, yet she seemed very fond of the discourse. "My past happiness, said she, appears a dream to me. Yet I cannot forget, that I was beloved by the greatest and most lovely of mankind. I was chosen from all the rest, to make all his campaigns with him; and I would not survive him, if I was not passionately fond of the princess my daughter. Yet all my tenderness for her was hardly enough to make me preserve my life. When I left him, I passed a whole twelvemonth without seeing the light. Time has softened my despair; yet I now pass some days every week in tears, devoted to the memory of my sultan." There was no affectation in these words. It was easy to see she was in a deep melancholy, though her good humour made her willing to divert me.

But her dress was something so surprisingly rich, that I cannot forbear describing it to you. She wore a vest called dualma, which differs from a caftan by longer sleeves, and folding over at the bottom. It was of purple cloth, strait to her shape, and thick set, on each side, down to her feet, and round the sleeves, with pearls of the best water, of the same size as their buttons commonly are. You must not suppose, that I mean as large as those of my Lord ——, but about the bigness of a pea; and to these buttons large loops of diamonds, in the form of those gold loops, so common on birth-day coats. This habit was tied, at the waist, with two large tassels of smaller pearls, and round the arms embroidered with large diamonds. Her shift was fastened at the bottom with a great diamond, shaped like a lozenge; her girdle as broad as the broadest English ribband, entirely covered with diamonds. Round her neck she wore three chains, which reached to her knees; one of large pearl, at the bottom of which hung a fine coloured emerald, as big as a turkey-egg; another, consisting of two hundred emeralds, close joined together, of the most lively green, perfectly matched, every one as large as a half-crown piece, and as thick as three crown pieces, and another of small emeralds, perfectly round. But her ear-rings eclipsed all the rest. They were two diamonds, shaped exactly like pears, as large as a big hazle-nut. Round her talpoche she had four strings of pearl —— the whitest and most perfect in the world, at least enough to make four necklaces, every one as large as the duchess of Marlborough's, and of the same shape, fastened with two roses, consisting of a large ruby for the middle stone, and round them twenty drops of clean diamonds to each. Besides this, her head-dress was covered with bodkins of emeralds and diamonds.

Although Galileo did not invent the telescope, he was the first to turn it toward the sky for astronomical purposes. Among the things he noted were the topographical details of the Moon’s surface, sunspots, new stars, and the moons of Jupiter, which he shrewdly named the Medicean Planets after Tuscany’s ruling fam-ily.