the telescope was first constructed. A
year or so previous to this a spectacle-maker of Middleburgh in Holland,
one Hans Lippershey, had, it appears, hit upon the fact that distant
objects, when viewed through certain glass lenses suitably arranged,
looked nearer.[8] News of this discovery reached the ears of Galileo
Galilei, of Florence, the foremost philosopher of the day, and he at
once applied his great scientific attainments to the construction of an
instrument based upon this principle. The result was what was called an
"optick tube," which magnified distant objects some few times. It was
not much larger than what we nowadays contemptuously refer to as a
"spy-glass," yet its employment upon the leading celestial objects
instantly sent astronomical science onward with a bound. In rapid
succession Galileo announced world-moving discoveries; large spots upon
the face of the sun; crater-like mountains upon the moon; four
subordinate bodies, or satellites, circling around the planet Jupiter;
and a strange appearance in connection with Saturn, which later
telescopic observers found to be a broad flat ring encircling that
planet. And more important still, the magnified image of Venus showed
itself in the telescope at certain periods in crescent and other forms;
a result which Copernicus is said to have announced should of necessity
follow if his system were the true one.

The discoveries made with the telescope produced, as time went on, a
great alteration in the notions of men with regard to the universe at
large. It must have been, indeed, a revelation to find that those points
of light which they called the planets, were, after all, globes of a
size comparable with the earth, and peopled perchance with sentient
beings. Even to us, who have been accustomed since our early youth to
such an idea, it still requires a certain stretch of imagination to
enlarge, say, the Bright Star of Eve, into a body similar in size to our
earth. The reader will perhaps recollect Tennyson's allusion to this in
_Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After_:--

"Hesper--Venus--were we native to that splendour or in Mars,
We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars.

"Could we dream of wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite,
Roaring London, raving Paris, in that point of peaceful light?"

The form of instrument as devised by Galileo is called the Refracting
Telescope, or "Refractor." As we know it to-day it is th