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Vitrum Annulare, Pastes

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364
VITRUM ANNULARE.
If there be any truth in a strange story alluded to by Pliny, as " more famous than well authenticated," a secret had been once discovered in the art which there is small likelihood will ever be regained. " It is said that in the time of Tiberius was found out a way of tempering glass so as to make it malleable, but that the inventor's entire establishment was exterminated, for fear the value of bronze, silver, and gold should suffer diminution in consequence." It must be remembered that Pliny was born under this emperor, and would not have alluded to the report had it not been a matter of public notoriety. Petronius, Pliny's senior by some twenty years, makes his Trimalchio, an amateur in virtue of his wealth, give a humorous version of the same tale:—"I prefer glasses; others do not. If glasses were not so brittle, I would rather them than gold ; as it is, they are of little value. Yet there was once an artist who made a glass that would not break. He was admitted before the emperor with his present. After the latter had admired it, he requested Cœsar to give it him back again, and then dashed it upon the pavement. The emperor could not help being frightened almost out of his wits ; but my man picks up the bowl from the ground, and lo ! it was only bruised, just as if it had been of brass. Thereupon he takes out a little hammer, and leisurely makes it all right again. Having done this, he thought himself already at the summit of his wishes, especially when the emperor asked him, ' Does any one else know of this mode of tempering glass ? ' Now mark me. As soon as he had answered ' No,' the emperor ordered him to be beheaded then and there ; for if his invention had become general we should look upon gold as so much clay." There may be something at the bottom of the legend, and it may be explained by supposing the substance not a true glass, but some composition representing the coloured kind in which the Roman scyphi were usually made. A ring found in a mummy-case once came under my examination, exactly resembling amber-coloured glass, but which was as flexible as indian-rubber, being probably moulded in some resinous composition. Now a bowl in a similar substance would exactly resemble glass, and yet be as flexible as the softest metal, even as thin pewter. Supposing such a counterfeit to have been passed off upon Tiberius for a
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