As to the more powerful optical instruments, the telescope and microscope, although it would appear that Alhazen in the 10th or 11th century, Roger Bacon in the 13th, and Fracastoro and Baptist Porta in the 16th, had formed some idea that lenses might be made and combined so that distant objects might be seen clearer, or near ones magnified beyond the power of normal vision; yet we hold with Kepler, that no instrument analogous to our telescope was known before the early part of the 17th century.
The combination of lenses associated with the name of Galileo, was, he tells us, of Dutch origin, and of a date anterior to that of his telescope, constructed by him in 1609; and this would appear to be the probable origin of the microscope consisting of a combination of a convex object lens with a concave eye lens.[3]
It now appears almost impossible to assign the exact date of the first production of the microscope (as distinguished from the simple magnifying lens), but those who have made a special investigation, agree that it must have been invented between 1590 and 1609, and that either of the three spectacle-makers of Middelburg, Holland, Hans Janssen, his son Zacharias Janssen, and Hans Lippershey, may have been the inventor, the probabilities being in favour of the Janssens, and there the question must remain.
The history of the modern microscope, like that of nations and arts, has had its brilliant periods, in which it shone with uncommon splendour, and was cultivated with extraordinary ardour; these periods have been succeeded by intervals marked with no discovery, and in which the science seemed to fade away, or at least to lie dormant, till some favourable circumstance--the discovery of a new object, or some new improvement in the instruments of observation--awakened the attention of the curious, and reanimated the spirit of research. Thus, soon after the invention of the microscope, the field it presented to observation was cultivated by men of the first rank in science, and who enriched almost every branch of natural history by the discoveries made by means of this instrument.
To the celebrated Dr. Hooke belongs the honour of publishing an account of the compound instrument in 1665 in his “Micrographia.” His first claim, however, is founded on the application of a lamp adjustable on a pillar, together with a glass globe of water and a deep plano-convex condensing lens. By means of this arrangement, he says, “The light can be directed more directly on the object under examination.” In the further description given of his microscope, he explains: “It has four draw-tubes for lengthening the body, and a third lens to the optical combination.” This, it would appear, was only brought into use when he wished to see the whole object at once: “The middle-glass lens, conveying a very great company of radiating pencils (of light) which would stray away; but when I had occasion to examine the small parts of a body, I took out the middle glass and made use of one eye-glass with the object-glass.”