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Vitrum Annulare, Pastes

Vitrum Annulare, Pastes Page of 453 Vitrum Annulare, Pastes Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
362
VITRUM ANNULARE.
from that country, however well authenticated it may appear to the inexperienced. But a long time back an instance beyond all suspicion came under my observation, of a paste prepared for the matrix. It was of a dark, translucent blue, lenticular in shape, and found together with a carnelian ring-stone, not engraved, and a silver ring set with a red Jasper bearing a rude intaglio, all deposited under a large stone amongst some ruins of the ancient Isca Silurum.
This single relic supplies in itself a reason for believing that the art of making paste intagli was then carried on in Britain, as we know was the case with that of bead-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 Roman-British manufactory once occupying the site, and are not all indiscriminately to be accounted the mere harvest of the lapidaries who annually sow the sands with broken bottles for such lucrative returns.
The ancient process of glass-making was simple in the ex­treme, and the result of a lucky accident. Some Phoenician 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 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 discovered 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,8 and main-
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