HOOKE 137 



scope. Spectacles were evidently familiar to Chaucer^ 

 and Lydgate.^ Telescopes were invented in Holland 

 about the year 1608. Galileo soon heard of them, and 

 proceeded to make some for himself, with which he 

 discovered, in 1610 or shortly after, the satellites of 

 Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the mountains of the 

 moon. He seems to have immediately perceived that 

 the telescope might be transformed into an instrument 

 for the enlargement of minute objects. The narrative 

 of a Scotchman, named Wodderborn, then resident in 

 Rome, quotes from Galileo's own mouth the description 

 of an insect's eye, when magnified. The Dutch micro- 

 scopes of Drebbel came several years later.* 



By 1625 there were many working opticians in 

 Holland, Paris and London,* who made compound 

 microscopes in a variety of forms, some very elaborate, 

 but all faulty and cumbrous. Simple lenses, very 

 diverse in style as in magnifying power, came to be 

 more and more favoured by working naturalists, and it 

 was with these that the best researches of the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries were carried out. 



Hooke was distinguished, even as a boy, by his 

 mechanical genius.^ He was educated at Westminster 

 School and afterwards at Oxford, where he became 

 known to Wilkins, Seth Ward and Willis. In 1654 

 Eobert Boyle came to reside at Oxford, and employed 

 Hooke first as his instructor, afterwards as his assistant. 



1 Tcde of the Wyf of Bathe, v. 1203 ; Squier's Tale, v. 234. 

 "London Lichpenny, st. 7. 



^ Some authors attribute the discovery o£ the compound microscope to the 

 Dutch optician, Zacharias Janssen, and put the date as early as 1590. 



* Descartes tells of the opticians of Paris ; most of Drebbel's microscopes 

 were made in London. 



* See his Life, by Richard Waller, prefixed to his Posthumous Works, 1705, 

 and the notice by Miss A. M. Gierke in Diet. Nat. Biog. 



