THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES OF ITALY. 113 



put under the patronage of one of the saints — St. John, the 

 " apostle of hidden visions," being chosen, to whose church they 

 repaired in order to gain his assistance in their troubles. But all 

 this only increased the duke's resentment, and young Cesi saved 

 himself from his father's wrath by flight, while Stelluti and De 

 Filiis were sent home under guard. 



Though separated, they found means of correspondence. Eck- 

 ius did not escape so easily. It appears that while in Holland 

 he was compelled to take a man's life in order to save his own, 

 but so clearly in the right that he was not even put upon trial. 



The duke, with dark treachery, through pretended friendship, 

 secured from Eckius the names of all the witnesses and his per- 

 sonal enemies, then hurried them to Rome to appear against him 

 before the ecclesiastical authorities. His rooms were ransacked 

 for any damaging evidence against him ; and his instruments and 

 manuscripts destroyed. 



After lying concealed until almost starved he surrendered, 

 when he was turned over to a troop of soldiers to be returned to 

 Holland. 



But, though footsore and weary from the forced marches, the 

 scientific spirit was still alert and uppermost. His observations 

 of natural history, written during this unhappy journey, he sent, 

 together with the drawings illustrating them, to Rome, where 

 they, with other valuable manuscripts of the Academy, were 

 kept treasured in the Albani Library until the French inva- 

 sion. 



The year 1609 was a memorable one in the annals of the Acad- 

 emy, as it was of science in general, as the date of the invention of 

 the telescope. When, in the spring of this year, a rumor of the 

 accidental discovery at Middelburg of the magnifying power of 

 certain lenses, which suggested to the alert mind of Galileo the 

 telescope, reached Italy, Delia Porta, in a letter dated August 

 28th, from Naples to Cesi, gives a drawing of a telescope with a 

 reference for its principles to his work on Optics, published in 

 1589. Since Porta did not see the telescope until Galileo brought 

 his to Rome in 1611, the Neapolitan, by his own great knowledge 

 of optics, conceived of the correct principle on which it must be 

 built, and thus far forestalls Galileo ; but — and the but is here all- 

 important — Porta simply made a sketch, while Galileo built the 

 instrument. The records of the Academy of this date determine 

 that the words " telescope " and " microscope " were first used by 

 Frederico Cesi. " In 1609 the Government of Venice made a con- 

 siderable present to Signor Galileo, of Florence, Professor of 

 Mathematics at Padua, and increased his annual stipend by one 

 hundred crowns, because, with diligent study, he found out a rule 

 and measure by which it is possible to see places thirty miles dis- 



TOL. XLII. — 8 



