GIGANTIC TELESCOPES PROPOSED.
Hooke is said to have proposed the use of Telescopes having a length of upwards of 10,000 feet (or nearly two miles), in order to see animals in the moon! an extravagant expectation which Auzout considered it necessary to refute. The Capuchin monk Schyrle von Rheita, who was well versed in optics, had already spoken of the speedy practicability of constructing telescopes that should magnify 4000 times, by means of which the lunar mountains might be accurately laid down.
Optical instruments of such enormous focal lengths remind us of the Arabian contrivances of measurement: quadrants with a radius of about 190 feet, upon whose graduated limb the image of the sun was received as in the gnomon, through a small round aperture. Such a quadrant was erected at Samarcand, probably constructed after the model of the older sextants of Alchokandi, which were about sixty feet in height.