Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/570

 560 Revieivs of Books tribute to advance science." So the science of arithmetic was not ad- vanced by the translation of the Rhind papyrus ; — but the history of the human mind was greatly advanced. Rigand's later discussion of the ques tion was too much in the same spirit. Merely for their probable mathema' tical interest, the papers would certainly repay the labor of examination Mr. Stevens rather timidly puts forth the suggestion that Harriotts in vented the telescope before Galileo. But Galileo is not now regarded as the first inventor of the instrument. Stevens does not seem to be aware that Leonard Digges's Pantometria first appeared in 1571, and that the combination of lenses there described could hardly have been actually made by an intelligent experimenter without his discovering the tele- scope. Now we know that Harriotts in 1585 was showing the Indians in Virginia wonderful things with "perspective glasses." By a " per- spective glass," at a somewhat later date, at any rate, was always under- stood a telescope ; and in strictness nothing else ought to be so called. Still, even supposing that Harriotts' s perspective glass was a camera obscura, which Baptista Porta had described in 1558 ; yet when we find him making "perspective trunkes," which unquestionably were tele- scopes, in 1609, only about a year later than Hans Lippersley's applica- tion for a Dutch patent, and remember his habitual neglect to claim discoveries, for which his correspondents reproach him, it certainly does seem most probable that in examining the apparatus of that supposed camera obscwa, he had observed phenomena which could not but lead a mind like his to making a telescope. It would be well worth while to examine his papers if only to find out how that was. He observed the satellites of Jupiter so nearly at the same time as Galileo, that his papers ought to be carefully searched, in order to ascer- tain the precise date and circumstances of his first seeing them. Moreover, it appears that Harriotts was the first of the series of English atomists, a series embracing minds as widely discrepant as Har- riotts, Cudworth, Boyle, Shaftesbury, Hartley, Dalton, Maxwell. In other points, his philosophical opinions were original ; but they remain obscure. This makes another urgent reason for a re-examination of his remains, to be followed, this time, by publication. America owes as much to Harriotts as England does. Is she not as able to afford the ways and means — in learning and in money — for such a publication as the mother country, who has spent so much, and so gloriously, upon history ? But, of course, until those papers shall have been examined, nothing at all can be claimed for Harriotts on the mere strength of probably ex- aggerated remarks by enthusiastic scholars addressing him in letters. Thus one of these, early in 1610, having just read Keppler's De Motu Stellae Martis says, " I remember long since you told me as much, that the motions of the planets were not perfect circles." Now, to have had that idea was certainly remarkable ; but there is a million miles between that and Keppler's discovery, which Harriotts could not possibly have made, since he was not in possession of Tycho's observa- tions.