THE UNIVERSE. DISCOVERIES IN THE CELESTIAL SPACES. 315 



and Zacliarias Jansen. The first named of these three 

 parties is always called Laprey in the important letter of the 

 Dutch ambassador Boreel to the physician Borelli, the 

 author of the memoir " De vero telescopii inventore." (1655.) 

 If the priority were to be determined by the precise times 

 when the offers were made to the States General, it would 

 belong to Hans Lippershey, who offered to the Govern- 

 ment, on the 2d of October, 1608, three instruments "with, 

 which one can see to a distance." The offer of Metius is 

 dated the 1 7th of October of the same year ; but he says 

 expressly in his petition, that " through meditation and in- 

 dustry he had constructed such instruments for two years." 

 Zacliarias Jansen (who, like Lippershey, was a spectacle- 

 maker at Middelburg), together with his father Hans Jan- 

 sen, invented the compound microscope, the eye-piece of 

 which is a concave lens, towards the end of the 16th cen- 

 tury (probably about 1590), but discovered the telescope 

 only in 1610, as the ambassador Boreel testifies. Jansen 

 and his friends directed the telescope towards remote ter- 

 restrial, but not towards celestial objects. The inappre- 

 ciable importance and magnitude of the influence exerted by 

 the microscope in communicating a more profound know- 

 ledge of all organic objects in respect to the conformation 

 and movements of their parts, and by the telescope in the 

 sudden opening of regions of cosmical space before un- 

 known, required this detailed reference to the history of 

 their discovery. 



When the news of the recent Dutch invention, or of the 

 discovery of telescopic vision, reached Venice, Galileo was 

 accidentally present ; he at once divined what, were the 



VOL. II. Y 



