The Lake County times., 1922-12-18

"A plate glass window?
A pretty face reflected? You
are fortunate. The house across
the way? Yes. But beyond that,
what do you see?
Bronzed men, clad only in loin
cloths, covering under the lash of
the slave driver, tramping clay,
1000 B. c.; a priestess darkening
her eyebrows with slibium from
phial, in the Temple of Khons at
Karnak, 1000 B. c.; young
patrician oiling his locks, before
q pier glass in the baths Of Pom
peii, l A. D.; the flare of furnaces
on a Venetian Canal, 100 A. D.;
a crude factory, in a clearing near
jamestown. Virginia, fashioning
baubles for the sisters Of Poca-
hontas, 1908 A. D.; men, clad in
little more than loin cloths, sur
rounded by machines controlled by
an electric button, tramping clay,
u. s. A., 1922 A. D.
You are looking into one Of the
Oldest Of the arts, Alice, for which
men have lived and died through
COCO years in order that you might
see a perfect world through your
plate glass window, or find reflect
ed fawlessly in your mirror-a
pretty face.
Vanity, vanity. all is vanity,
saith the Preacher. Perhaps-but
listen to the story Of your window
and your looking glass.
Glass Blundcr. Says Pliny.
Pliny set down the invention of
glass as an accident, into which a
group of Phoenician merchants
stumbled while cooking breakfast
in the dim days Of antiquity.
These Phoenicians beaehed their
galleys on the coast of Palestine,
according to Pliny. But when
they had built their camp fires
and tried to set up their cooking
pots to prepare the Phoenician
equivalent of ham and eggs, they
failed to find any stones in that
desert country. So the pots were
set up on cubes of soda from their
cargo. The heat of the fires melt
ed the soda and fuxed it with the
sand, and to their amazement they
beheld a clear fluid forming as
result Of the fluxing-glass.
Pliny VS.. Science.
Now Science, the iconoclast,
steps in and completely wrecks old
Pliny. For Science says that to
produce the fuxing of sand and
soda a heat of $500 degrees f.
would have been necessary, and
that breakfast fires didn't get that
hot, even in hot Palestine.
So Pliny, muttering impreca-
tions. is led from the witness stand
and thrown out of court.
One can imagine Pliny, outside,
wiggling his fingers at his nose
and shouting in low Latin, you
say you found glass in the temples
of the Fourth Dynasty, put there
in 1000 B. c., heh? Where did
those Egyptians get their $500
degrees F.?"
And, quite unable to answer, a
deep blush Of humiliation mantles
the DroW OF Science.
Solomon's Marine Grill
Monuments built in 3a98 B. C.
showed glass bottles containing red
wine. Benz Hasan, Egyptian
Michael Angelo, painted glass
blowers about 2750 B. c., and the
paintings are still in existence.
The Koran, good book Of the East,
records that Solomon, King of
Judah, paved a court with clear
glass laid over running water, in
which live fishes might be seen"
1t appears that those ultra-mod-
ern hotels with their marine grills
are not so ultra-modern after all.
The Queen OF Sheba, were she to
drop in for oysters, would proba-
bly, yawn, "Ho hum! What a
beastly bore. Solomon did all this
for me five thousand years ago"
The archaeologists dug a glass
boat out of the lava at Pompeii.
Scarus, an Aedile, or Superintend-
ent of Building. in Rome. con-
structed a theatre seating 10000
in which the second story was
entirely Of glass.
Cherchez la Femme!
In the middle ages all the world
but Venice forgot the craft of