200 THE WORLD MACHINE 



him a deadly antagonist, he stands boldly forth as the defender 

 of the Coppernican system. 



It is given to no man to construct the orbit of his time. 

 The outcome of the controversy we know ; but those who 

 listened to his flashing satire, his impassioned defence, could 

 hardly have guessed. Probably there were open-minded, im- 

 partial men in that day who heard and were still unconvinced. 

 Not the sanest and the wisest among them, not even Galileo 

 himself, could have dreamed that in neighbouring Holland a 

 meddlesome apprentice was possibly even then stumbling upon 

 a curious device which was to be a stone in a sling for the 

 slaying of one of the most Goliathan of myths that ever stalked 

 the camps of human thought. 



It is curious to think now how long men had before them 

 the elements of this toy which in the hands of Galileo was almost 

 to shake the earth from its foundations. When spectacles were 

 invented we do not know. The burning-glass must have been 

 thousands of years old ; of Archimedes' achievements with the 

 burning-mirror old Plutarch has left us an entertaining legend. 

 The explorer Layard found among the ruins of the palace of 

 Nimrud, at Nineveh, a convex lens of rock-crystal, which makes 

 it clear that even in that far-off day something of the powers 

 of this especial shape of rock-crystal must have been known. 

 Ptolemy of Alexandria wrote a treatise on refraction. Roger 

 Bacon in the thirteenth century described a telescope, though 

 he probably never made one. Still, the wondrous result of 

 putting a pair of lenses one before the other remained un- 

 disclosed. 



Be that as it may, we know that along in the fourteenth 

 century, perhaps before, spectacles came into use. Then, as the 

 story runs, a Dutch apprentice mounted a pair of lenses on a 

 stand, and looking through them, it was noted that the neigh- 

 bouring church steeple appeared to be drawn very near, and 

 to be turned upside down. This was the initial discovery. It 

 seems clear that some sort of telescope, more likely just a kind 

 of field-glass, came speedily to be made and sold in Holland. 

 It is on this ground that Galileo's title to the discoverer of the 

 telescope is disputed. But no one seems to have thought for 

 a moment of pointing one of these affairs at the stars. That at 

 least was all Galileo's own. 



In some fashion a vague report of these odd little affairs 



