122 THE HISTOEY AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE MICROSCOPE 



' I will not now attempt to explain all the perfections of this 

 wonderful occhiale \ our sense alone is a safe judge of the things 

 which concern it. But what more can I say of it than that by 

 pointing a glass to an object more than a thousand paces off, which 

 does not even seem alive, you immediately recognise it to be 

 Socrates, son of Sophronicus, who is approaching? But time and 

 the daily discoveries of new things will teach us how admirably the 

 glass does its work, for in that alone lies all the beauty of that 

 instrument. 



' I heard a few days back the author himself (Galileo) narrate to 

 the Most Excellent Signor Cremonius various things most desirable 

 to be known, and amongst others in what manner he perfectly dis- 

 tinguishes with his telescope the organs of motion and of the senses 

 in the smaller animals; and especially in a certain insect w r hich lias 

 each eye covered by a rather thick membrane, which, however, per- 

 forated with seven holes, like the visor of a warrior, allows it sight. 

 Here hast thou a new proof that the glass concentrating its rays 

 enlarges the object ; but mind what I am about to tell thee, viz. in 

 the other animals of the same size and even smaller, some of which 

 have nevertheless brighter eyes, these appear only double with their 

 eyebrows and the other adjacent parts.' 



After reading this document Govi judges that it is impossible ta 

 refuse Galileo the credit of the invention of a compouiid microscope 

 in 1610, and the application of it to examine some very minute 

 animals ; and if he himself neither then nor for many years after 

 made any mention of it publicly, this cannot take away from him or 

 diminish the merit of the invention. 



It is not to be believed, however, that Galileo after these first 

 experiments quite forgot the microscope, for in preparing the 

 ' Saggiatore ' between the end of 1619 and the middle of October, 

 1622, he spoke thus to Lotario Sarsi Segensano (anagram of Oratio 

 Grassi Salonense) : 



* I might tell Sarsi something new if anything new could be told 

 him. Let him take any substance whatever, be it stone, or wood y 

 or metal, and holding it in the sun examine it attentively and he 

 will see all the colours distributed in the most minute particles, and 

 if he will make use of a telescope arranged so that one can see very 

 near objects, he will see far more distinctly what I say.' 



It will not therefore be surprising if, in 1624 (according to 

 some letters from Rome, written by Girolamo Aleandro to the 

 famous M. de Peiresc), two microscopes of Kuffler, or rather Drebbel, 

 having been sent to the Cardinal of S. Susanna, who at first did not 

 know how to use them, they were shown to Galileo, who was then 

 in Rome, and he, as soon as he saw them, explained their use, as 

 Aleandro writes to Peiresc on May 24, adding, ' Galileo told me 

 that he had invented an occhiale which magnifies things as much 

 as 50,000 times, so that one sees a fly as large as a hen.' 



This assertion of Galileo, that he had invented a telescope which 

 magnified 50,000 times, so that a fly appears as big as a hen, 

 must, without doubt, be referred to the year 1610, and from the 

 measure given of the amplification by the solidity or volume the 



