NOTES. CX111 



optical instruments which Prince Maurice of Nassau and the Archduke Albert 

 had from Jansen (the Archduke gave his to Cornelius Drebbel), were, (as is evi- 

 dent from the letter of the ambassador Boreel, who had been, often in Janseu's 

 house when a child, and at a later period saw the instruments in the shop,) 

 microscopes 18 inches long, " through which small objects, when one looked 

 down at them from abore, appeared wonderfully magnified." The confusion 

 between the microscope and the telescope has contributed to obscure the his- 

 tory of the invention of both instruments. 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 inventions, Vincenzio 

 Antinori, in the Saggi di Naturali Esperienze fatte uelT Accademia del Cimento, 

 1841, p. 22 26. Even Huygens, who was born scarcely twenty-five 

 years after the supposed date of the invention of the telescope, did not 

 venture to decide with certainty respecting the name of the first inventor 

 (Opera reliqua, 1728, Vol. ii. p. 125). According to the researches which 

 Van Swinden and Moll have made in Archives, not only was Lij;pershey, as 

 early as the 2d of October, 1608, in possession of a telescope made by him- 

 self, but the French Ambassador at the Hague, President Jeaonin, wrote, on 

 the 2Sth 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 Gunzenhausen, one of 

 the two independent discoverers of Jupiter's satellites) even relates that his 

 friend Fuchs of Bimbach, Privy Councillor of the Margrave of Ansbach, was 

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

 by a Belgian. Telescopes were made in London in February 1610, or a year 

 after Galileo had completed his telescope (Rigaud on Harriot's Papers, 1833, 

 p. 23, 26, and 46). They were at first called cylinders. Porta, the inventor 

 of the camera obscura, as well as, at earlier periods, Fracastoro the cotempo- 

 rary of Columbus, Copernicus, and Cardanus, had merely spoken of the pos- 

 sibility " of seeing every thing larger and nearer" by looking through convex 

 and concave glasses placed on each other (duo specilla ocularia alterum alteri 

 superposita) ; but we cannot ascribe to them the invention of the telescope 

 (Tiraboschi, Storia della Letter, ital. T. xi. p. 467 j Wilde, Gesch. der Optik, 

 Th. i. S. 121). Spectacles had been known in Haarlem since the beginning 

 of the 14th century ; and an epitaph in the church of Maria Maggiore at 

 Florence names as the inventor (inventore degli occhiali) Salvino degli Armati, 

 deceased in 1317. Separate and apparently authentic notices of the use of 

 VOL. II. 2 I 



