318 COSMOS. 



Laprey in the important letter of the Dutch embassador Bo- 

 reei to the physician Borelli, the author of the treatise De vero 



1831, vol. i., p. 319 ; and by Wilde, of Berlin, in his Gesch. der Optik, 

 1838, th. i., s. 138-172. The work referred to, and written in the 

 Dutch language, is entitled " Geschiedkvndig Onderzoek naar de eerste 

 Uitfinders der Vernkykers, uit de Aunekenningen van wyle den Hoogl. 

 van Swinden zamengesteld door, G. Moll," Amsterdam, 1831. Albers 

 has given an extract from this interesting treatise in Schumacher's Jahr- 

 buck fiir 1843, s. 56-65. The optical instruments with which Jan- 

 seu furnished Prince Maurice of Nassau, and the Archduke Albert (the 

 latter gave his to Cornelius Drebbel), were (as is shown by the letter 

 of the embassador Boreel, who, when a child, had been often in the 

 house of Jansen, the spectacle maker, and who subsequently saw the in- 

 struments iu the shop) microscopes eighteen inches in length, " through 

 which small objects were wonderfully magnified when one looked 

 down at them from above." The confusion between the microscope 

 and the telescope has rendered the histtjry of the invention of both in- 

 struments obscure. 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 Gali- 

 leo. Compare, on this obscure history of optical instruments, Vicenzio 

 Aiitinori, in the Saggi di Naturali Esperienze fatte nelV Accademia del 

 Cimento, 1841, p. 22-26. Even Huygens, who was bom scarcely twen- 

 ty-five years after the conjectural date of the invention of the telescope, 

 does not venture to decide with certainty on the name of the first in 

 ventor {Opera Reliqna, 1728, vol. ii., p. 125). According to the re- 

 searches made in public archives by Van S widen and Mole, Lippershey 

 was not only in possession of a telescope made by himself as early as 

 the 2d of October, 16U8, but the French embassador at the Hague, Pres- 

 ident Jeauuin, wrote, on the 28th of December of the same year, to 

 Sully, " that he was in treaty wnth the Middleburg spectacle maker for 

 a telescope, which he wished to send to the king, Henry IV." Simon 

 Maiius (Mayor of Genzenhausen, one of the discoverers of Jupiter's 

 satellites) even relates that a telescope was offered for sale in the au 

 tumn of 1608, at Frankfort-on-Maine, by a Belgian, to his friend Fuchs 

 of Bimbach, Privy Counselor of the Margrave of Ansbach. Telescopes 

 were made in London in February, 1610, therefore a year after Galileo 

 had completed his own. (Rigaud, On Hariofs Papers, 1833, p. 23, 26, 

 and 46.) They were at first called cylinders. Porta, the inventor of 

 the camera obsctira, like Francastero, the cotemporary of Columbus, 

 Copernicus and Cardanus, at earlier periods, had merely spoken of the 

 possibility " of seeing all things larger and nearer" by means of convex 

 and concave glasses being placed on each other (duo specilla ocularia 

 alterura alteri superposita) ; but we can not ascribe the invention of 

 the telescope to them (Tiraboschi, Storia della Letter., ital., t. xi., p 

 467; Wilde, Gesch. der Optik, th. i., s. 121). Spectacles had been 

 known in Haarlem since the beginning of the fourteenth century; and 

 an epitaph in the church of Maria Maggiore, at Florence, names Salvi- 

 no degli Armati, who died in 1317, as the inventor (inventore degli oc- 

 chiali). Some apparently authentic notices of the use of spectacles by 

 aged persons are to be met with as early as 1299 and 1305: The pas- 

 sages of Roger Bacon refer to the magnifying power of spheincal seg. 

 ments of glass. See Wilde, Gesch. der Optik, th. i., s. 93-96 ; and anit, 

 p. 245. 



