“The invention of the microscope is variously attributed to the Dutch spectacle-maker Zacharias Janssen in 1590 and to Galileo, who announced it in 1610. In 1656 the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted with wonder: ‘There are now such Microscopes . . . that the things we see with them appear a hundred thousand times bigger, than they would do if we looked upon them with our bare Eyes.’”

—Cynthia Wall, The Bedford Cultural Edition of The Rape Of The Lock by Alexander Pope, 1998.