Evidently Hevelius had at this time no notion of the effect of the plano-convex form of lens as such in lessening aberration, but he mentions a curious form of telescope, actually due to De Rheita, in which the objective is double, apparently of two plano-convex lenses, the weaker ahead, and used with a concave eye lens. If properly proportioned such a doublet would have less than a quarter the spherical aberration of the equivalent double convex lens. Hevelius also mentions the earlier form of re-inverting telescope above referred to, and speaks rather highly of its performance. To judge from his numerous drawings of the moon made in 1643 and 1644, his telescopes were much better than those of Scheiner and Fontana, but still woefully lacking in sharp definition. Nevertheless the copper plates of the _Selenographia_, representing every phase of the moon, placed the lunar details with remarkable accuracy and formed for more than a century the best lunar atlas available. One acquires an abiding respect for the patience and skill of these old astronomers in seeing how much they did with means utterly inadequate. One may get a fair idea of the size, appearance, and mounting of telescopes in this early day from Fig. 8, which shows a somewhat advanced construction credited by Hevelius to a suggestion in Descartes’ _Dioptrica_. Appearances indicate that the tube was somewhere about six feet long, approximately two inches in aperture, and that it had a draw tube for focussing. The offset head of the mount to allow observing near the zenith is worth an extra glance. Incidentally Hevelius, with perhaps pardonable pride, also explains the “Polemoscope,” a little invention of his own, made, he tells us, in 1637. It is nothing else than the first periscope, constructed as shown in Fig. 9, a tube _c_ with two right angled branches, a fairly long one _e_ for the objective _f_, a 45° mirror at _g_, another at _a_, and finally the concave ocular at _b_. It was of modest size, of tubes 1⅔ inch in diameter, the longer tube being 22 inches and the upper branch 8 inches, a size well suited for trench or parapet. [Illustration: FIG. 8.—A Seventh Century Astronomer and his Telescope.] Even in these days of his youth Hevelius had learned much of practical optics as then known, had devised and was using very rational methods of observing sun-spots by projection in a darkened room, and gives perhaps the first useful hints at testing telescopes by such solar observations and on the planets. He was later to do much in the development and mounting of long telescopes and in observation, although, while progressive in other respects, he very curiously never seemed to grasp the importance of telescopic sights and consistently refused to use them.