EAllLY DAYS OF THE MICROSCOPE 



Zeeland, and close to the house where I was bom, 

 there lived in the year 1591 a certain spectacle 

 maker, Hans by name. His wife, Maria, had a son, 

 Zacharias, whom I knew very well, because I con- 

 stantly as a neighbour and from a tender age went 

 in and out playing with him. This Hans or 

 Johannes with his son Zacharias, as I have often 

 heard, were the first to invent microscopes, which 

 they presented to Prince Maurice, the governor and 

 supreme commander of the United Dutch forces, and 

 were rewarded with some honorarium. Similarly 

 they afterwards offered a microscope to the Austrian 

 Archduke Albert, supreme governor of Holland. 

 When I was Ambassador to England in the year 

 1619, the Dutchman Cornelius Drebbel of Alkomar, 

 a man familiar with many secrets of nature, who 

 was serving there as a mathematician to King James, 

 and was well known to me, showed me that very 

 instrument which the Archduke had presented as 

 a gift to Drebbel, namely, the microscope of Zach- 

 arias himself. Nor was it (as they are most seen) 

 with a short tube, but nearly two and a half feet 

 long, and the tube was of gilded brass two fingers' 

 breadth in diameter, and supported on three dol- 

 phins formed also of brass. At its base was an 

 ebony disc, containing shreds or some minute objects 

 which we inspected from above, and their forms were 

 so magnified as to seem almost miraculous." So 

 this was the first compound microscope ! 



Although Zacharias invented the microscope, it 

 was Galileo who introduced it to the scientific world. 



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