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Vitrum Annulare, Pastes

Vitrum Annulare, Pastes Page of 384 Vitrum Annulare, Pastes Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
VITRUM ANNULARE.                         349
making, and corroborates the opinion expressed by Wright (in his ' Celt, Roman, and Saxon·') that the rolled lumps of beautifully coloured glass found in the shingle on the Brighton beach are the relics of some Boman-British manu­factory once occupying the site, and ought not all indiscri­minately to he accounted the mere harvest of the lapidaries who annually sow the sands with broken bottles to reap such lucrative returns.*
The ancient process of glass-making was simple in the extreme, and the result of a lucky accident. Some Phoeni-cian traders, returning from Egypt with a ship-load of natron (native soda, the soap of the ancients), chanced to land at the mouth of the river Belus, close to the city of Ptolemais in Palestine ; and not being able to find any stones on that sandy and muddy beach wherewith to prop up their caldron over the fire, they used for the purpose some lumps of natron out of the ship. Afterwards finding, in the ashes of their fire, streams of a novel and shining substance, they repeated the experiment, and so discovered the components of glass. For many ages this strip of the coast, not more than half a mile in extent, supplied the world with sand for this manufacture ; but in Pliny's age it had been ascertained that the sand from the mouth of the Volturnus (Neapolitan) was equally good. Sidon was the seat of the manufacture for a long period. Alexandria succeeded for works of the more artistic kind,! and main-
* This opinion has lately received strong additional confirmation from the inspection of what was shown me for a curious pebble picked up on the sands at Tenby. It certainly much resembled a transparent Calcedony, containing two petrified, striped, snail-shells, but proved to be an unfashioned mass of ancient British glass, rounded into a pebble-form by the action of the sea.
t Here was invented the most elegant and durable representative of value ever devised, the glass money issued by the Fatimite sultans dating from the tenth century. It consists of thick disks of green glass, bearing a legend in letters raised in red enamel.
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