The fallacy in Galileo’s reasoning is that he refers the motion of the water to the earth’s axis, but the motion of the land to the fixed stars. In other words, he unconsciously smuggles in the absent parallax through the back door. No effect of the earth’s annual motion relative to the fixed stars could be found. Galileo finds it in the tides, by bringing the fixed stars in where they do not belong. The tides became an Ersatz for parallax.
