(282.) The explanation which our knowledge of optical laws affords of the mechanism of the eye, and the process by which vision is performed, is as complete and satisfactory as that of hearing by the propagation of motion through the air. The camera obscura, invented by Baptista Porta in 1560, gave the first idea how the actual images of external objects might be conveyed into the eye, but it was not till after a considerable interval that Kepler, the immortal discoverer of those great laws which regulate the periods and motions of the planets, pointed out distinctly the offices performed by the several parts of the eye in the act of vision. From this to the invention of the telescope and microscope there would seem but a small step, but it is to accident rather than design that it is due; and its re-invention by Galileo, on a mere description of its effects, may serve, among a thousand similar instances, to show that inestimable practical applications lie open to us, if we can only once bring ourselves to conceive their possibility, a lesson which the invention of the achromatic telescope itself, as we have above related it, not less strongly exemplifies.
(283.) The little instrument with which Galileo’s splendid discoveries were made was hardly superior in power to an ordinary finder of the present day; but it was rapidly improved on, and in the hands of Huyghens attained to gigantic dimensions and very great power. It was to obviate the necessity of the enormous length required for these telescopes, and yet secure the same power, that Gregory and Newton devised the reflecting telescope, which has since become a much more powerful instrument than its original inventors probably ever contemplated.
(284.) The telescope, as it exists at present, with the improvements in its structure and execution which modern artists have effected, must assuredly be ranked among the highest and most refined productions of human art; that in which man has been able to approximate most closely to the workmanship of nature, and which has conferred upon him, if not another sense, at least an exaltation of one already possessed by him that merits almost to be regarded as a new one. Nor does it appear yet to have reached its ultimate perfection, to which indeed it is difficult to assign any bounds, when we take into consideration the wonderful progress which workmanship of every kind is making, and the delicacy, far superior to that of former times, with which materials may now be wrought, as well as the ingenious inventions and combinations which every year is bringing forth for accomplishing the same ends by means hitherto unattempted.[50]