10 Mr. Drinkwater's Observations respecting 



aansz (commonly called Melius) also possessed the art of ma- 

 king them on the 1 7th of the same month, and that he then 

 professed to have been engaged in the experiments which led 

 him to it during two years previously; and it is advanced as 

 probable that Hans, or his son Zachary Jansen, invented a 

 compound microscope about 1590. 



Dr. Moll, by whom this paper was communicated, has done 

 me the honour to notice my sketch of the Life of Galileo, in 

 which I had arrived nearly at the same results with respect to 

 the claims of Lippershey and Jansen ; although some of my 

 statements were necessarily imperfect, from want of access to 

 those official records, now for the first time produced from the 

 Dutch archives. Dr. Moll has, however, thought fit to com- 

 ment on some assertions of mine in terms which call for some 

 reply on my part: this would have been attempted earlier, 

 had I earlier seen the paper in question. 



Dr. Moll has also pointed out an error committed by me 

 in calling both Peter Borel the author of the treatise De vero 

 Telescopii Inventore, and William Boreel the ambassador, by 

 the Italian name Borelli ; and a similar error in translating 

 the Latin name of Van den Hore, whom I have conibunded 

 with his contemporary Gartner, both using the same Latin 

 signature Hortensius. For these, and I fear many other er- 

 rors as well as omissions in that essay, I have little apology to 

 offer, and feel nothing but obligation to those who may be at 

 the pains to discover them. But I wish to defend myself (even 

 when writing anonymously) from the charge which Dr. Moll 

 insinuates, of affecting to quote from books which I know only 

 by extracts, I protest against this practice as a dishonest one, 

 by which stories often obtain currency and credit on the sup- 

 position that they have been examined by several authors, who 

 in fact have merely copied one from another. I consider it 

 essential to the truth of history that the real authority should 

 be cited whenever any is given. In the only instance in my 

 own case where I was not writing either with the original au- 

 thority before me, or an extract copied out of it with my own 

 hand, I have given a double reference (p. 58.) to the author 

 whose statement I repeated, and to the manuscript from which 

 he professed to have drawn his account. It may perhaps be 

 true that Borel's book is scarce; but I found it in the British 

 Museum, which is tolerably rich in scientific works of the six- 

 teenth and seventeenth centuries; indeed the copy which I 

 used there seems more perfect than the one alluded to in a note 

 on Dr. Moll's article, for it contains a portrait of Jansen as 

 well as of Lippershey. 



Although my principal object in this communication is to 



