It was long before the phrenzy of public curiosity abated. Sirturi describes a ludicrous violence which was done to himself, when, with the first telescope which he had succeeded in making, he went up into the tower of St. Mark, at Venice, in the vain hope of being there entirely unmolested. Unluckily he was seen by some idlers in the street: a crowd soon collected round him, who insisted on taking possession of his instrument, and, handing it one to the other, detained him there for several hours till their curiosity was satiated, when he was allowed to return home. Hearing them also inquire eagerly at what inn he lodged, he thought it better to quit Venice early the next morning, and prosecute his observations in a less inquisitive neighbourhood.[44] Instruments of an inferior description were soon manufactured, and vended every where as philosophical playthings, much in the way in which, in our own time, the kaleidoscope spread over Europe as fast as travellers could carry them. But the fabrication of a better sort was long confined, almost solely, to Galileo and those whom he immediately instructed; and so late as the year 1637, we find Gaertner, or as he chose to call himself, Hortensius, assuring Galileo that none could be met with in Holland sufficiently good to show Jupiter's disc well defined; and in 1634 Gassendi begs for a telescope from Galileo, informing him that he was unable to procure a good one either in Venice, Paris, or Amsterdam. The instrument, on its first invention, was generally known by the names of Galileo's tube, the perspective, the double eye-glass: the names of telescope and microscope were suggested by Demisiano, as we are told by Lagalla in his treatise on the Moon.[45] FOOTNOTES: [32] Mecanique Analytique. [33] Histoire des Mathématiques, tom. ii. [34] "Per duo specilla ocularia si quis perspiciat, altero alteri superposito, majora multo et propinquiora videbit omnia."—Fracast. Homocentrica, § 2, c. 8. [35] Si utrumque recte componere noveris, et longinqua et proxima majora et clara videbis.—Mag. Nat. lib. 17. [36] The passage in the original, which is printed alike in the editions of 1598, 1607, 1619, and 1650, is as follows: Visus constituatur centro valentissimus speculi, ubi fiet, et valentissimè universales solares radii disperguntur, et coeunt minimè, sed centro prædicti speculi in illius medio, ubi diametri transversales, omnium ibi concursus. Constituitur hoc modo speculum concavum columnare æquidistantibus lateribus, sed lateri uno obliquo sectionibus illis accomodetur, trianguli vero obtusianguli, vel orthogonii secentur, hinc inde duobus transversalibus lineis, ex-centro eductis. Et confectum erit specillum, ad id, quod diximus utile. [37] Diximus de Ptolemæi _speculo_, sive _specillo_ potius, quo per sexcentena millia pervenientes naves conspiciebat. [38] Il Telescopio, 1627. [39] Magia Naturæ et Artis Herbipoli, 1657. [40] Lettère d'Uomini illustri. Venezia, 1744.