THE instrument known as the Microscope derives its name from two Greek words, small, and to view; that is, to see or view such minute objects as without its aid would be invisible. The honors of the Italians and the Dutch; the name of the inventor, however is lost. Probably the discovery did not at first appear sufficiently important to engage the attention of those men who, by their reputation in science, were able to establish an opinion of its merit, and to hand down the name of its inventor to succeeding ages.

If we consider the microscope as an instrument consisting of the lens only, it is not at all improbable that it was known at a very early period, nay even in a degree to the Greeks and Romans ; at any rate, it is tolerably certain that spectacles were used early Thirteenth century. Those spectacles were used as early as the thirteenth century. Now as the glasses of these were made of different convexities, and consequently of different magnifying powers, it is natural to suppose that smaller and more convex lenses were made and applied to the examination of minute objects. Many among the learned refuse to the ancients knowledge of magnifying lenses, and a fortiori that of refracting telescopes since according to them, the Greeks and Romans had only very imperfect notions with respect to the fabrication of glass.

From a passage in Aristophanes it is plain that globules of glass were sold at the shops of the grocers of Athens , in the time of that comic author, He speaks of them as a burning spheres. Plinty states that the immense theatre erected at Rome by Scaur us, son-in-law of sylla, was three stories in height, and that the second of these stories was entirely inlaid with a mosaic of glass. Ptolemy, in his Optics, he has inserted a table of the refractions which light experience under different angles of incidence in passing from air glass. The values of these angles, which differ only in a slight degree from those obtained in the present day by means of similar experiments, prove the glass of the ancients differed very little from that manufactured in our own times.

There is in the French Cabinet of Medals a seal, said to have belonged to Michale Angelo, the fabrication of which, it is believed, ascends to a very remote epoch, and which fifteen figure have been engraved in a circular space of fourteen millimeters in diameter. These figures are not all visible to the naked eye. Cicero makes mention of an Iliad of Homer written for parchment, which was comprised in nutshell. Plinty relates that Myrmecides, a Milesian, executed in ivory a square figure which a fly covered with its wings.

Unless it be maintained that the powers of vision of our ancestors surpassed those of the most skilful modern artist, these facts establish that magnifying property of lenses was known to the Greeks and Romans nearly two thousand years ago. We may beside advance a step further, and borrow from Seneca a passage whence the some truth will emerge in a manner still more direct and decisive. In the Natural Question we read: However and clearer when viewed through a globule of glass filled with water.

Dutes has seen in the Museum of Portici ancient lenses which had a focal length of only nine millimeters. He actually possessed one of these lenses, but of a longer focus, which was extracted from the ruins of Heculaneum. At the meeting of the British Association, held at Belfast in the year 1852, Sir David Brewster showed a plate of rock-crystal worked into the form of a lens, which was recently found among the ruins of Nineveh. Sir David Rrewster, so competent a judge in a question of this kind, maintained that this lens had been distained for optical purposes, and that it never was an article of dress.

It is not difficult to fix the period when the microscope first began to be generally known, and to be used for the purpose of examining minute objects, for though we are ignorant of the name of the first inventor, we are acquainted with the names of those who introduced it to public view Zacharias Jansens and his son are said to have made microscope before the year 1590: about that time the ingenious Cornelius Drebell brought one made by them with him to England, and showed it to William Borrell and others. It is possible this instrument of Drebella was not strictly what is now called a microscope, but was rather a kind of microscope telescope, something similar in principle to that lately described by M. Aepinus in a letter to the Academy of Sciences at St. Peterburgs.

It was formed of a copper tube six feet long and one inch in diameter, support by three brass pillars in the shape of dolphins; these were fixed to a base of ebony, on which the objectsto be viewed by the microscope were placed. Fontana, in a work which he published in 1646, says that he had made microscopes in the year 1618: this may be perfectly true, without derogating from the merit of the Jansens; for we have many instances in our own times of more than one person having made same invention nearly simultaneously. In 1685 Stelluti publish a description of the parts of a bee, which he had examined with a microscope.

The history of the microscope, like that of nations and arts, has had its brilliant periods, in which it shone with uncommon splendor, and was cultivated with extraordinary ardor; and these 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 favorable improvement in the instrument of observation awakened the attention of the curios, and reanimated their researches. Thus, soon after the invention of the microscope, the field it presented to observation was cultivated by men of the first rank in science, who enriched almost every branch of natural history by the discoveries they made by means of this instruments.