EYEGLASSES

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 120, 18 February 1928, Page 19

EYEGLASSES

Writers have disregarded eyeglasses (says a contributor to “Outlook”), and he suggests that a book might be written on the subject. He traces the various stages of spectacles, mentioning the iron-bound glasses of Benjamin Franklin, the monocle, the pince-nez, and the lorgnette. The last stage of all is "the round black or brown-rimmed spectacles of rubber or tortoise-shell which so many people are wearing. They are in shape and appearance a return to the oldest of all old spectacles, which appeared in Europe in the thirteenth century, and might have been brought from China to Italy by Marco Polo so far as their appearance tells. But in their modern form they are light in weight, and that is the reason for their popularity. One man says that their use began to be noticed, so far as he observed, among the students at Harvard about 1905. just 20 ”“ars ago, and, that a firm of Boston opticians supplied them at that rime. Another man testifies that in 1906 he bought a pair of them in Boston, and undertook to wear them in Washington But he abandoned the attempt, at least in public, when he found that babies in their perambulators bawled as he went by and that horses showed a tendency to run away. Tn a few years thev were common everywhere, and now thev have developed a score of variants, until the rims seem to be made of almost any substance, even of barleysugar candv.