Galilei Galileo was an early man of science;
He was happy when inventing, or discussing an appliance;
Pendulums, he found by study, were precise in every wobble—
Showing how old Father Time went in his never-ending hobble.
Galilei Galileo the thermometer invented
And informed the gaping public what its figures represented.
“O you foolish Galileo,” cried the public, “you shall rue it!
Why get up a thing to tell us we are hot? We always knew it.”
Galilei Galileo took a tube and got some lenses
And discovered things that made him rather disbelieve his senses;
He would point his telescope up to the sky and then he’d scan it,
Then go in to breakfast smiling, for he’d found another planet.
Galilei Galileo viewed the luminary solar
(That’s the sun) and found it spotted on the belt and regions polar;
But he didn’t figure out that when the sun was thickly freckled
Then the world with lights and fusses was continually speckled.
Galilei Galileo wrote a thing and then denounced it—
But we often read his name and wonder how the man pronounced it.
Maybe when he tried to he was all at sixes and at sevens,
Which is why he turned his studies to the dim and distant heavens.
Galilei Galileo! What a musical cognomen!
Possibly some bright librettist will find in this name an omen
That presages fortune for him, and the stage will pay what we owe
To that honest old star gazer, Galilei Galileo.