2 HISTORY OF THE MICROSCOPE. 



nelius Drebell brought one made by them with him to England, and 

 showed it to William Borrell and others. It is possible this instrument 

 of Drebell's was not strictly what is now called a microscope, but was 

 rather a kind of microscopic telescope, something similar in principle 

 to that lately described by M. Aepinus in a letter to the Academy of 

 Sciences at St. Petersburg. It was formed of a copper tube six feet 

 long and one inch in diameter, supported by three brass pillars in the 

 shape of dolphins ; these were fixed to a base of ebony, on which the 

 objects to be viewed by the microscope were placed. Fontana, in a 

 work which he published in 1646, says that he had made microscopes 

 in the year 1618 : this may be perfectly true, without derogating from 

 the merit of the Jansens j for we have many instances in our own times 

 of more than one person having made the same invention nearly simul- 

 taneously, without any communication from one to the other. In 1685 

 Stelluti published a description of the parts of a bee, which he had 

 examined with a microscope. 



If we consider the microscope as an instrument consisting of one 

 lens only, it is not at all improbable that it was known at a very early 

 period, nay even in a degree to the Greeks and Romans ; at any rate, 

 it is tolerably certain that spectacles were used as early as the thirteenth 

 century. Now as the glasses of these were made of different convexi- 

 ties, and consequently of different magnifying powers, it is natural to 

 suppose that smaller and more convex lenses were made, and applied 

 to the examination of minute objects. 



Aristophanes, who lived five centuries before Christ, speaks of a 

 " burning-sphere." Seneca, who wrote in the first half-century of the 

 Christian era, says that small and indistinct objects become larger and 

 more distinct in form when seen through a globe of glass filled with 

 water. Pliny also mentions the burning property of lenses made of glass. 

 The history of the microscope, like that of nations and arts, has 

 had its brilliant periods, in which it shone with uncommon splendour, 

 and was cultivated with extraordinary ardour ; and these have been 

 succeeded by intervals marked with no discovery, and in which the 

 science seemed to fade away, or at least to lie dormant, till some fa- 

 vourable circumstance the discovery of a new object, or some new 

 improvement in the instruments of observation awakened the atten- 

 tion of the curious, and reanimated their researches. Thus, soon after 

 the invention of the microscope, the field it presented to observation 

 was cultivated by men of the first rank in science, who enriched almost 

 every branch of natural history by the discoveries they made by means 

 of this instrument. 



