An ornate headpiece features a central human face surrounded by floral and foliate scrolls.

COMPENDIOUS

ASTROSCOPY,

A decorative drop cap "Q" begins the text.It happens to almost all new inventions that, having risen from small beginnings, they become greater and more perfect through the care and treatment of men. We observe that this has happened especially to that admirable art of extending vision. For it is known how slight and almost nothing it was at its first origin, when some of its rudiments were seen obscurely explained in the books of Giambattista della Porta the Neapolitan; yet the efforts of our countrymen so surpassed these that they were not undeservedly considered its first inventors. Galileo, however, far surpassed these in turn, with so many and such great things in the heavens detected by the work of his tube, of which nothing had been perceived before him. It seemed that nothing more excellent than the instruments he had prepared for himself would be found. But, if he were to return to life now, who would doubt that he himself would prefer those things that have since come into existence to his own; both ours, by which we were the first to behold the true shapes and the ring of the planet Saturn; and even more so, those Italian ones that succeeded them, elaborated by excellent craftsmen. Using these, that most distinguished man Giovanni Domenico Cassini deduced other new phenomena in the sky; the revolutions of the planetary globes