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Although we cannot doubt the veracity of Galileo, when he affirms that he had never seen any of the Dutch telescopes, yet it is expressly stated by Fuccarius, that one of these instruments had at this time been brought to Florence; and Sirturus assures us that a Frenchman, calling himself a partner of the Dutch inventor, came to Milan in May 1609, and offered a telescope to the Count de Fuentes. In a letter from Lorenzo Pignoria to Paolo Gualdo, dated from Padua, on the 31st of August 1609, it is expressly said, that, at the re-election of the professors, Galileo had contrived to obtain 1000 florins for life, which was alleged to be on account of an eye-glass like the one which was sent from Flanders to the Cardinal Borghese.

In a memoir so brief and general as the present, it would be out of place to discuss the history of this extraordinary invention. We have no hesitation in asserting that a method of magnifying distant objects was known to Baptista Porta and others; but it seems to be equally certain that an instrument for producing these effects was first constructed in Holland, and that it was from that kingdom that Galileo derived the knowledge of its existence. In considering the contending claims, which have been urged with all the ardour and partiality of national feeling, it has been generally overlooked, that a single convex lens, whose focal length exceeds the distance at which we examine minute objects, performs the part of a telescope, when an eye, placed behind it, sees distinctly the inverted image which it forms. A lens, twenty feet in focal length, will in this manner magnify twenty times; and it was by the same principle that Sir William Herschel discovered a new satellite of Saturn, by using only the mirror of his forty-feet telescope. The instrument presented to Prince Maurice, and which the Marquis Spinola found in the shop of John Lippershey, the spectacle maker of Middleburg, must have been an astronomical telescope consisting of two convex lenses. Upon this supposition, it differed from that which Galileo constructed; and the Italian philosopher will be justly entitled to the honour of having invented that form of the telescope which still bears his name, while we must accord to the Dutch optician the honour of having previously invented the astronomical telescope.

The interest which the exhibition of the telescope excited at Venice did not soon subside: Sirturi[10] describes it as amounting almost to phrensy. When he himself had succeeded in making one of these instruments, he ascended the tower of St Mark, where he might use it without molestation. He was recognised, however, by a crowd in the street; and such was the eagerness of their curiosity, that they took possession of the wondrous tube, and detained the impatient philosopher for several hours, till they had successively witnessed its effects. Desirous of obtaining the same gratification for their friends, they endeavoured to learn the name of the inn at which he lodged; but Sirturi fortunately overheard their inquiries, and quitted Venice early next morning, in order to avoid a second visitation of this new school of philosophers. The opticians speedily availed themselves of the new instrument. Galileo’s tube,—or the double eye-glass, or the cylinder, or the trunk, as it was then called, for Demisiano had not yet given it the appellation of telescope,—was manufactured in great quantities, and in a very superior manner. The instruments were purchased merely as philosophical toys, and were carried by travellers into every corner of Europe.

The art of grinding and polishing lenses was at this time very imperfect. Galileo, and those whom he instructed, were alone capable of making tolerable instruments. It appears, from the testimony of Gassendi and Gærtner, that, in 1634, a good telescope could not be procured in Paris, Venice, or Amsterdam; and that, even in 1637, there was not one in Holland which could shew Jupiter’s disc well defined.

After Galileo had completed his first instrument, which magnified only three times, he executed a larger and a better one, with a power of about eight. “At length,” as he himself remarks, “sparing neither labour nor expense,” he constructed an instrument so excellent, that it bore a magnifying power of more than thirty times.

The first celestial object to which Galileo applied his telescope was the moon, which, to use his own words, appeared as near as if it had been distant only two semidiameters of the earth. He then directed it to the planets and the fixed stars, which he frequently observed with “incredible delight.”[11]

The observations which he made upon the moon possessed a high degree of interest. The general resemblance of its surface to that of our own globe naturally fixed his attention; and he was soon able to trace, in almost every part of the lunar disc, ranges of mountains, deep hollows, and other inequalities, which reverberated from their summits and margins the rays of the rising sun, while the intervening hollows were still buried in darkness. The dark and luminous spaces he regarded as indicating seas and continents, which reflected, in different degrees, the incidental light of the sun; and he ascribed the phosphorescence, as it has been improperly called, or the secondary light, which is seen on the dark limb of the moon in her first and last quarters, to the reflection of the sun’s light from the earth.

These discoveries were ill received by the followers of Aristotle. According to their preconceived opinions, the moon was perfectly spherical, and absolutely smooth; and to cover it with mountains, and scoop it out into valleys, was an act of impiety which defaced the regular forms which Nature herself had imprinted. It was in vain that Galileo appealed to the evidence of observation, and to the actual surface of our own globe. The very irregularities on the moon were, in his opinion, the proof of divine wisdom; and had its surface been absolutely smooth, it would have been “but a vast unblessed desert, void of animals, of plants, of cities, and of men—the abode of silence and inaction—senseless, lifeless, soulless, and stripped of all those ornaments which now render it so varied and so beautiful.”

In examining the fixed stars, and comparing them with the planets, Galileo observed a remarkable difference in the appearance of their discs. All the planets appeared with round globular discs like the moon; whereas the fixed stars never exhibited any disc at all, but resembled lucid points sending forth twinkling rays. Stars of all magnitudes he found to have the same appearance; those of the fifth and sixth magnitude having the same character, when seen through a telescope, as Sirius, the largest of the stars, when seen by the naked eye. Upon directing his telescope to nebulæ and clusters of stars, he was delighted to find that they consisted of great numbers of stars which could not be recognised by unassisted vision. He counted no fewer than forty in the cluster called the Pleiades, or Seven Stars; and he has given us drawings of this constellation, as well as of the belt and sword of Orion, and of the nebula of Præsepe. In the great nebula of the Milky Way, he descried crowds of