but in 1658 a
description of Kepler's portable tent camera for sketching, taken from
it, was published in a work called _Graphice, or the most excellent Art
of Painting_, but no mention is made of Kepler. In W. Oughtred's English
edition (1633) of the _Recreations mathematiques_ (1627) of Jean
Leurechon ("Henry van Etten") there is a quaint description, with
figures, of the simple dark chamber with aperture, and also of a sort of
tent with a lens in it and the projection on an inner wall of the face
of a man standing outside. The English translation of Porta's _Natural
Magick_ was published in 1658.

Robert Boyle seems to have been the first to construct a box camera with
lens for viewing landscapes. It is mentioned in his essay _On the
Systematic or Cosmical Qualities of Things_ (ch. vi.), written about
1570, as having been made several years before and since imitated and
improved. It could be extended or shortened like a telescope. At one end
of it paper was stretched, and at the other a convex lens was fitted in
a hole, the image being viewed through an aperture at the top of the
box. Robert Hooke, who was some time Boyle's assistant, described
(_Phil. Trans._, 1668, 3, p. 741) a camera lucida on the principle of
the magic lantern, in which the images of illuminated and inverted
objects were projected on any desired scale by means of a broad convex
lens through an aperture into a room where they were viewed by the
spectators. If the objects could not be inverted, another lens was used
for erecting the images. From Hooke's _Posthumous Works_ (1705), p. 127,
we find that in one of the Cutlerian lectures on Light delivered in
1680, he illustrated the phenomena of vision by a darkened room, or
perspective box, of a peculiar pattern, the back part, with a concave
white screen at the end of it, being cylindrical and capable of being
moved in and out, while the fore part was conical, a double convex lens
being fixed in a hole in front. The image was viewed through a large
hole in the side. It was between 4 and 5 ft. long.

Johann Zahn, in his _Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus_ (1685-1686),
described and figured two forms of portable box cameras with lenses. One
was a wooden box with a projecting tube in which a combination of a
concave with a convex lens was fitted, for throwing an enlarged image
upon the focusing screen, which in its proportions and application is
very similar to our modern telephotographic objectives.