700 



COSMOS. 



Laprey in the important letter of the Du-^ch ambassador 

 Boreel to the physician Borelli, the author of the treatise De 

 vero telescopiiinventore (1655). If the claim of priority be 

 determined by the periods at which offers were made to the 

 General States, the honour belongs to Hans Lippershey ; for, 

 on the 2nd of October, 1608, he offered to the government 

 three instruments " by which one might see objects at a dis- 

 tance." The offer of Metius was made on the 17th of Octo- 

 ber of the same year; but he expressly says, "that he has 



rendered the history of the invention of both instruments obscure. The 

 letter of Boreel (Paris, 1655), above alluded to, notwithstanding the 

 authority of Tiraboschi, renders it improbable that the first invention 

 of the compound microscope belonged to Galileo. Compare, on this 

 obscure history of optical instruments, Yicenzio Antinori, in the Saggi 

 di Naturall JSsperienze fatte nell' Accademia del Cimento, 1841, pp. 

 S2--26. Even Huygens, who was born scarcely twenty-five years after 

 the conjectural date of the invention of the telescope, does not venture 

 to decide with certainty on the name of the first inventor (Opera 

 reliqua^ 1728, vol. ii. p. 125). According to the researches made in pub- 

 lic archives by Yan Swiden and Mole, Lippershey was not only in posses- 

 sion of a telescope made by himself as early as the 2nd of October, 1608, 

 but the French ambassador at the Hague, President Jeannin, wrote, on 

 the 28th of December of the same year, to Sully, "that he was in treaty 

 with the Middleburg spectacle-maker for a telescope, which he wished 

 to send to the king, Henry IV." Simon Marius (Mayer of Genzen- 

 hausen, one of the discoverers of Jupiter's satellites) even relates that a 

 telescope was offered for sale in the autumn of 1608, at Frankfort-on- 

 Maine by a Belgian, to his friend Fuchs of Bimbach, Privy Councillor 

 of the Margrave of Ansbach. Telescopes were made in London in 

 Februaiy, 1610, therefore a year after Galileo had completed his own. 

 (Piigaud, On Harriots Papers, 1833, pp. 23, 26, and 46.) They were 

 at first called cylinders. Porta, the inventor of the camera obscura, like 

 Francastero, the cotemporary of Columbus, Copernicus and Cardanus, 

 at earlier periods, had merely spoken of the possibility " of seeing all 

 things larger and nearer " by means of convex and concave glasses being 

 placed on each other (duo specilla ocularia alterum alteri superposita) ; 

 but we cannot ascribe the invention of the telescope to them (Tirabos- 

 chi, Storia della Letter., ital. t. xi. p. 467; Wilde, Gesch. der Optilc, 

 th. i. s. 121). Spectacles had been known in Haarlem since the begin- 

 ning of the fourteenth century ; and an epitaph in the church of Maria 

 Maggiore, at Florence, names Salvino degli Armati, who died in 1317, 

 as the inventor (inventore degli occhiali). Some apparently authentic 

 notices of the use of spectacles by aged persons are to be met with as 

 early as 1299 and 1305. The passages of Eoger Bacon refer to the 

 magnifying power of spherical segments of glass. Sec Wilde, Gesch. des 

 Optilc, th. i. s. 93-96 ; and above, p. 619. 



