HISTORY OF PHYSICAL ASTRONOMY.

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lions of any of the individuals alluded to, conduced to practical results,and therefore we cannot be justified in awarding to either of them thehonour associated with the invention of the telescope.

It has long been generally admitted that telescopes were first made inHolland, about the beginning of the seventeenth century ; but the questionwith respect to the real author of the invention has, until very recently,been involved in much obscurity. Three persons have been generallymentioned as possessing distinct claims to this much-contested honour.These are, Henry Lipperliey and Zacharias Jansen , spectacle makers inthe town of Middleburg, and James Metius of Alkmaer, a son of themathematician of that name, celebrated for having been the first whoexpressed the relation between the diameter and the circumference ofa circle by the numbers 113 and 355.

Descartes , in his treatise on Dioptrics, published in the year 1637,thus alludes to the origin of the telescope “ It is now about thirtyyears since a person named James Metius, who never studied at all,although his father and brother were both professors of mathematics, butwho took pleasure in constructing mirrors and burning glasses, of whichhe had many of various forms in his possession, thought of lookingthrough two lenses, one convex and the other concave. These happenedon one occasion to be situated at the proper distance for magnifyingobjects, whereupon he applied them to the ends of a tube, and in thismanner he constructed the first telescope.”

Sphyrlseus de Rheita, the Capucin friar, gives another account of theinvention, in a work published a few years later *. He states thattelescopes; were first made by Lipperliey, whom he calls Lippensum, andhe refers the date of the invention to the year 1609. Lipperliey, hap-pening to place a concave before a convex glass, discovered by accidentthat the weathercock of a neighbouring church and other objects appearednearer and larger. Having fitted the glasses in a tube, he placed theinstrument in liis shop, and amused his customers by showing them themagnified image of the weathercock. The Marquis of Spinola, who wasthen at the Hague , bought the instrument, and presented it to the Arch-duke Albert of Austria , by whom the great utility of the invention wasfirst made known to the world.

During the early part of the seventeenth century numerous con-flicting accounts circulated throughout Europe relative to the origin ofthe invention, which was in all cases alleged to be due to accident. Itis singular that so much uncertainty should have prevailed respecting anevent of so recent a date. In 1655, Pierre Bore], physician to the French king, published a work at the Hague f, professing to contain authenticparticulars relative to this much-disputed question. He had taken con-siderable pains to collect all the evidence which might throw any lightupon the matter, and he was warmly seconded in this object by WilliamBoreel, the Dutch envoy at the Court of France . He searched out fiveindividuals who were personally acquainted with the reputed inventors ofthe telescope, and induced them to make public declarations on the sub-ject of the invention before the magistrates of Middleburg. The workabove referred to contains the details of the examination of those persons,together with a letter of William Boreel’s relative to the same subject. Twoof the witnesses deposed in favour of Jansen , but they differ in the dates they

* Oculus Enoch et Eliae, Antverpisa, 1645.

f De vero Telescopii Inventore, Hag., 4to, 1655.