Telescope, &c. were first known in England. 67 



has a whole chapter (the eighth of his tract De Nullitate 

 Magice) " on the Concealment of the Secrets of Nature 

 and Art*:" and the free-masons adhere to this maxim at 

 the present hour. Digges the son, however, makes no 

 mention of tradition ; for he expressly affirms, that his fa- 

 ther's knowledge of optics "partly grew by the aid he had 

 by one old written booke of Bakon's experiments, that by 

 strange adventure, or rather destinie, came to his hands ; 

 though chiefly by conioyning continuall iaborious practise 

 with his mathematical 1 studies" (§ 9). But surely we should 

 not think it more " strange" that a MS. of Roger Bacon 

 should fall into the hands of Digges, than that a writing 

 300 years old should come into the possession of an anti- 

 quary of the present day (and many much older writings 

 are yet extant) ; nor nearly so strange as that you should 

 now have in your hands the MS. of Raymond Lully, men- 

 tioned in the foot note. And that Digges, " chiefly by con- 

 ioyning continuall laborious practise with mathematicall 

 studies," should discover the construction of the telescope, 

 is by no means so strange as that Porta, Jansen, and Me- 

 tius, should hit upon the same thing, as they appear to have 

 done, without either labour or mathematics ; especially if 

 it be true that " the optical principles whereon telescopes 

 are founded, were well known to the antient geometricians, 

 being contained in Euclid f, and that it was for want of 

 attention thereto that the world was so long without that 

 admirable invention J." I say, f/* this be true; but I must 



* I have just seen an old MS. dared 1319, with a similar title, namely, 

 Liber Secretorum Natur/r, " A Book on the Secrets of Nature," by the 

 famous Raymond Lully, a cotemporary of Ro^er Bacon. The philo- 

 sophers of the middle ages did no more than continue the exoteric and 

 esoteric rules of the antients. For example, the Dionysians of Ionia mo- 

 nopolized the building of temples, &c. as the freemasons did the erection 

 of cathedrals ; and both kept their science secret: for much science the 

 builders of our cathedrals certainly possessed. Nay, the learned compiler 

 of the article Arch, in the Supp. to the Encycl. Britann. does not scruple 

 to affirm that " there is infinitely more scientific skill displayed in a Gothic 

 cathedral than in all the buildings of Greece and Rome:" and he appeals 

 to the nice balancing of the arches in the open spires at Brussels, &c. 9 

 to which he might have added those of St. Giles's, Edinburgh ; St. Ni- 

 cholas's, Newcastle i and King's College, Aberdeen. Sir C. Wren was 

 one of the few moderns who could imitate such structures; as he has 

 successfully done in the elegant spire of St. Dunstan's in the East. If 

 the cotemporaries of Bacon possessed such consummate skill in architec- 

 ture, why not some skill in optics f But this I merely ask, without press- 

 ing it as an argument. 



f Nor Euclid the compiler of the Elements. Sec the Note, vol. xviii. 

 p. 54, of this Magazine. 



$ Harris's Lexicon Iccknicum, article Tdescopt. 



E^ confer 



