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VITRUM ANNULARE.
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" Paste," from the Italian pasta, is
most strangely changed from its primary meaning. Who could discern any
analogy between coloured glass and dough, the proper sense of the word
? It comes in fact from pastus, food ; and the grand staple of the Southern Italian's dinner has been from time immemorial the dough of the gran duro (the ancient puis) moulded into a variety of curious forms, but all going under the generic name of paste. Prom the same root springs the pâte of the French, and our own pasty, which
varies less from the original. The Italians, when they revived the
fabrication of imitative gems, applied to the softened plastic material
the familiar household word.
Pastes
are imitations in glass of the precious stones, and also of engraved
gems, camei and intagli, transparent and opaque; and the process of the
manufacture is the following : —A small iron case of the diameter
required is filled with a mixture of fine tripoli and pipeclay
moistened, upon which is made an impression from the gem to be copied.
This matrix is then thoroughly dried, and a bit of glass of the proper
colour laid flat upon it. If a stone of different strata has to be
imitated, so many layers of different-coloured glass are piled upon
each other. The whole is next placed within a furnace, and watched
until the glass is just beginning to melt, when the softened mass is
immediately pressed down upon the mould by
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