ZOOLOGY AND BOTANY, MICROSCOPY, ETC. 579 



This ' Scritto ' is now in the possession of tlie Accademia dei Lincei, in a 

 large manuscript volume entitled, ' 318 Varia principis Caesii Lynceo- 

 rum Acadcmise, 985,' where it is found on p. 372 recto, and was printed 

 by Faber, with slight variations, in the book already quoted of ' Tessoro 

 Messicano.' 



The Abbe Eezzi, in a work of his on the invention of the Microscope, 

 (16) thought that he might conclude from the passage of Wodderborn, 

 reproduced above, that Galileo did not invent the compound Microscope, 

 but gave a c mvenient form to the simple Microscope, and in this way as 

 good as invented it, for the Latin word used by Wodderborn, perspicil- 

 lum, " signified at that time, it is clear (Eezzi says), no other optical 

 instrument than spectacles or the telescope, never the Microscope, of 

 which there is no mention whatever in any book published at that time, 

 nor in any manuscript known till then." 



But Eezzi was not mindful that on the 16"th October, 1610, the date 

 of Wodderborn's essay, the name of Microscope had not yet been 

 invented, nor that of telescope, which, according to Faber, was the idea 

 of Cesi, according to others of Giovanni Demisiauo of Cephalonia, at the 

 end (perhaps) of 1610, but more probably at the time of Galileo's 

 journey to Eome from the 29th March to the 4th June, 1611. If, 

 therefore, the word Microscope had not yet been invented, and if the 

 telescope or the occhiale, as it was then called, was by all named 

 pers2>icillum, one cannot see why Wodderborn's perspicillum cannot have 

 been a cannocchiale (telescope) smaller than the usual ones, so that it 

 could easily be used to look at near objects, but yet a cannocchiale with 

 two lenses, one convex and one concave like the others, and, therefore, 

 a real compound Microscope, although not mentioned by that name either 

 by Wodderborn or others. And besides that, how could it be that 

 Wodderborn beginning to treat '' Adniirabilis hujus persi)icilli," that is, 

 of the telescope in the first line, should then have called perspicillum a 

 single lens in the eleventh line of the same page ? Eezzi's mistake is 

 easily explained, remembering that he had not under his eyes Wodder- 

 born's essay, but only knew a brief extract repf)rted by Venturi. (17) 



Less excusable is Eezzi's remark, that Galileo had been led to make 

 a Microscope of the one objective lens (perspicillum) of his telescope, 

 by a letter of Magini of the 28th September, 1610,(18) in which the 

 astronomer of Bologna tells him that, " Elongating the tube to double 

 the distance from its point of sight, and taking away the traguardo or 

 concave lens, one sees everything upside down, and very distinct although 

 very small." 



The cannocchiale, or rather the objective of the cannocchiale, used 

 in such a way to observe with the naked eye the reversed real image of 

 the object, would have been a singular discovery for better examining 

 small objects, as instead of showing them larger they would have looked 

 smaller than when observed by the naked eye. But Magini was not 

 aware that only the images of those objects looked smaller which were 

 placed in front of the objective lens at a distance greater than double 

 its principal focus, whilst the images of objects situated between that 

 distance and the focus of the lens were enlarged relatively to the object 

 from which they originate, although always reversed. But even if he 

 had known this peculiarity, it could not have suggested the idea of a 

 simple Microscope, for with this one does not look at a real image, but 

 at a virtual image of the object ; not at a reversed image, but at one 



