Telescope j ^c. werejlrsi knowfi in England. 25^ 



ihan's favourite amusement was to make burning glasses 

 and specula ; and in winter he formed some even of ice, a 

 material w hich is known by experience to be not unfit for 

 this purpose. As on account of this pursuit he had at hand 

 itiany glasses of various forms, by a lucky hit he applied 

 two oftheiu to his eye, one of which was somewhat thicker 

 at the middle than at the edges ; the other, on the contrary, 

 being much more prominent at the edges than in the mid- 

 die ; and thus having happily fitted them to the extremities 

 of a tube, the telescope of which we speak thence derived 

 hs existence." Saverien, not attending, as he ought, to these 

 words of his illustrious countryman, who passed nmch of 

 bis time in Holland, tells us that /' Kepler is the inventor 

 of the telescope," and that " it certainly was not brought 

 into use till the year I609 *." But Kepler himself advances 

 no pretensions to the discovery. In the dedication to his 

 Dioptrice, which is dated January I6I 1 , he says that " some 

 were then contending about the honour of the first in- 

 vention of the instrument, and others boasting of having 

 brought it to perfection ; but that Galileo had secured a 

 more splendid triumph, in having first shown its use in de- 

 tecting the arcana of astronomy, — a triumph, by the way, 

 to which, with all due respect to the celebrated *' Tuscan 

 artist," our great countryman Harriot has equally strong 

 pretensions f. Kepler then modestly prefers his claim to 

 the first discovery of the rationale of '•' the dioptrical reed" 

 {arundo divptrica), as be calls the telescope, but by ne means 

 to the discovery of the instrument itself. Borelli % and 

 other writers favour the pretensions of Jansen of Middle- 

 burgh, and Sirturus those of Lippersheim, another Dutch- 

 man, 



14. But the earliest claim, next to that of the Diggeses, 

 and the still prior one I shall presently notice, is that of 

 John Baptista Porta, whose pretensions to the first discovery- 

 of the Camera ohscura we have just considered. This mo- 

 dern Italian Maecenas, in his Magia Naturalis, published, 

 as we have seen, about l^g*, has these words, " Siutrum- 

 (jUerecte, &;c. If you know how rightly to combine both 

 these" (a concave glass and a convex one) ''^you will clearly 



* Saverien, Diction. Univ. de Math, et de Physique, articles Lunette and 

 Tdncope. 



f See the account which Dr. Zach, astronomer to the duke of Saxe- 

 Gotha, published in the Astrun. Ephem. of the Royal Acad, of Sciences 

 at Be.^lin for 1788, of Harriot's papers found by him in 1784 at Pctwo th 

 in Sussex, the scat of lord Egrcmout. See also Dr. Hutton's Diet., or 

 the Encycl. Britan. art. Harriot. 



% In Ijis tract Dc vero Tekicofiorum Invcntore, ed. 1655, cap. 12. 



see 



