Excerpt from An Introductory Treatise on the Nature and Properties of Light, and on Optical Instruments More than two thousand years have passed away since Aristotle, the earliest writer on Optics, whose Treatise has outlived the ravage of time, penned his unsuccessful paper. About fifty years after the celebrated Euclid wrote his in which he maintains that, "Visual rays issue from the eyes in diverging right lines, so as to form a pyramid, or cone, whose vertex is in the eye, and whose base encircles the object we contemplate." In 218, B. C., Archimides flourished; and a few years afterwards Ptolemy Euergetes fixed his great mirror on the tower of the Pharos at Alexandria. In the twelfth century, the celebrated Arabian Philosopher wrote his Treatise; afterwards published under the title of Thesaurus Opticae; and during the three following centuries arose Bacon, Porta, Maurolicus and Kepler. The seventeenth century produced Antonio de Dominis, Harriot, Boyle, Hooke, Grimaldi, Leibnitz, Barrow, - and the pride of England, Sir Isaac Newton. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."