The earliest history of the compound microscope is difficult to separate from that of the telescope and, in any complete account, the two instruments must be considered together. It appears that the first scientist that conceived the idea of using a series of lenses, rather than a single lens, was Leonard Digges, whom we have already mentioned. In a book by Porta, a writer who though not himself original, was gifted with great curiosity and industry in the collection of the ideas of others, we read: “How to make plain a letter held far away by means of a lens of crystal,” and also that “with a concave lens you see things afar smaller but plainer, with a convex lens you see them larger but less distinct. If, however, you know how to combine the two sorts properly you will see near and far both large and clear.” Shortly after the publication of Porta’s book the method of combining two lenses into a microscope or telescope was discovered, quite accidentally, by a Dutch boy named Zacharias, who worked in the shop of his father, a spectacle maker. The event was described by Willem Boreel, Dutch Ambassador to France, in a letter written in 1655. He wrote: “I am a native of Middleburg, the capital of Zeeland, and close to the house where I was born, there lived in the year 1591 a certain spectacle maker, Hans by name. His wife, Maria, had a son, Zacharias, whom I knew very well, because I constantly as a neighbour and from a tender age went in and out playing with him. This Hans or Johannes with his son Zacharias, as I have often heard, were the first to invent microscopes, which they presented to Prince Maurice, the governor and supreme commander of the United Dutch forces, and were rewarded with some honorarium. Similarly they afterwards offered a microscope to the Austrian Archduke Albert, supreme governor of Holland. When I was Ambassador to England in the year 1619, the Dutchman Cornelius Drebbel of Alkomar, a man familiar with many secrets of nature, who was serving there as a mathematician to King James, and was well known to me, showed me that very instrument which the Archduke had presented as a gift to Drebbel, namely, the microscope of Zacharias himself. Nor was it (as they are most seen) with a short tube, but nearly two and a half feet long, and the tube was of gilded brass two fingers’ breadth in diameter, and supported on three dolphins formed also of brass. At its base was an ebony disc, containing shreds or some minute objects which we inspected from above, and their forms were so magnified as to seem almost miraculous.” So this was the first compound microscope!