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Updated: May 1, 2025
Huyghens and Newton did more; they calculated the difference between the greatest and least axes, the excess of the equatorial diameter over the line of the poles.
Huyghens and Newton had made considerable progress in optics; Newton had approximately calculated the rate of transmission of sound; and the continental mathematicians had succeeded in determining some of the laws of sonorous vibrations. Magnetism and electricity had been considerably advanced by Gilbert. Chemistry had got as far as the mutual neutralisation of acids and alkalies.
Some of it was taken up with criticisms of his thought products of a leisurely age when the thinkers of Europe were a brotherhood, calling to each other across the dim populations; some represented the more deferential doubts of disciples or the elegant misunderstandings of philosophic dilettanti, some his friendly intercourse with empirical physicists like Boyle or like Huyghens, whose telescope had enlarged the philosopher's universe and the thinker's God; there was an acknowledgment of the last scholium from the young men's society of Amsterdam "Nil volentibus arduum," to which he sent his Ethica in sections for discussion; the metropolis which had banished him not being able to keep out his thought.
In justice it must be admitted that Huyghens, the seventeenth-century originator of the undulatory theory of light, caught a glimpse of the true ether; but his contemporaries and some eight generations of his successors were utterly deaf to his claims; so he bears practically the same relation to the nineteenth-century discoverers of ether that the Norseman bears to Columbus.
For a telescope which has no micrometer, the Huyghenian or negative eye-piece, as it is commonly called, is the best. As made by Huyghens, it consists of two plano-convex lenses, with their plane sides next the eye, as shown in the figure. So far as we have yet described our telescope it is optically complete.
"The same markings which were indistinctly revealed to the eyes of Fontana and Huyghens in 1636 and 1659 will continue to be displayed to the astronomers of succeeding generations, though with greater fullness and perspicuity owing to improved means.
Very likely Huyghens' proof from direct observation, though in reality not a whit more complete and far rougher, would have been regarded as the first true proof of the existence of Saturn's ring, just as Sir W. Herschel's observation of one star actually moving round another was regarded as the first true proof of the physical association of certain stars, a fact which Michell had proved as completely and far more neatly half a century earlier, by a method, however, which was 'caviare to the general.
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