58 THE EARLIEST STEPS IN THE INVENTION OF 



accident. It appears that while still a lad and at work in the 

 shop of his father, who was a spectacle maker, he happened to 

 place two lenses in a tube and found that they acted as a microscope 

 or telescope. Effective instruments were constructed by him in the 

 first decade of the seventeenth century. The evidence that Jansen 

 was really the first consti'uctor of these bilenticular instruments rests 

 on the testimony of Willem Boreel (1591-1668), the Dutch Ambas- 

 sador to France, Boreel's evidence is given in a letter by him to 

 Pierre Borel (1620-1671), which runs as follows: — 



" 1 am a native of Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland, and 

 close to the house where I was born . , , there lived in the 

 year 1591 a certain spectacle maker, Hans by name. His wife, 

 Maria, had a son Zacharias, whom I knew very well, because as a 

 neighbour and from a tender age I constantly went in and out 

 playing with him. This Hans, or Johannes, with his son Zacharias, 

 as I have often heard, were the first to invent microscopes, which 

 they presented to Prince Maurice, the governor and supreme 

 commander of the united Dutch forces, and were rewarded with 

 some honorarium. Similarly, they afterwards offered a microscope 

 to the Austrian Archduke Albert, supreme governor of Holland. 

 When I was Ambassador to England in the year 1619, -the Dutch- 

 man Cornelius Drebbel of Alkomar, a man familiar with many 

 secrets of nature, who was serving there as mathematician to King 

 James, and was well known to me, showed me that very instrument 

 which the Archduke had presented as a gift to Drebbel, namely^ 

 the microscope of Zacharias himself. Nor was it (as they are now 

 seen) with a short tube, but nearly two and a-half feet long, and 

 the tube was of gilded brass, two fingers breadth in diameter, and 

 supported on three dolphins formed also of brass. At its base was 

 an ebony disc, containing shreds or some minute objects which we 

 inspected from above, and their forms were so magnified as to seem 

 almost miraculous." This passage is contained in a work by Pierre 

 Borel, De vero telescopii inventoi'e ciim brevi omnhim conspiciliorum 

 historia, The Hague, 1655. 



(12) Jan Lij)j)ershey of Wessel (flourished 1608) is another 

 candidate for the same honours as Zacharias. In October, 1608,. 

 a man named Lippershey applied at the Hague for a monopoly 

 in the making of a bilenticular apparatus for examining objects at 

 a distance. Even at that date, however, it appears from the evidence 

 that such instruments were already known. The story of Lippershey's 

 discovery is suspiciously like that told of Zacharias. The application 

 and findings of the committee that sat on it were still in existence 

 in the early part of the nineteenth century, and were published by 

 J. H. van Swinden. See S. Moll, Journal of the Royal Institution,. 

 Vol. 1, 1831. 



(13) Jacoh Andrianzoon, otherwise James Metius of Alkmaar, 

 was a younger brother of a distinguished geometrician. Of him 

 Descartes, in his Diopfrique, published in 1637, writes as follows: — 

 " It is about 30 years since one named Jacques Metius, an unlearned 

 man, but one who loved to make mirrors and burning glasses, having 

 by him glasses of various shape, thought of looking through two 

 of them, of which one was convex, and the other concave, and he 



