ABOUT SPECTACLES.

Evening Post, Volume XLVII, Issue 82, 7 April 1894, Page 2 (Supplement)

ABOUT SPECTACLES.

The late Wendell Phillips, in his lecture on the " Lost Arts," speaks of the ancients as having magnifying glasses. " Cicero said he had seen the entire Iliad, which is a poem as large as the New Testament, written on a skin so that it could be rolled up in the compass of a nutshell." It would hare been impossible either i to have written this or to have read j it without the aid of a magnifying glass. " In Parma a ring 2000 years old is shown, which once bolonged to Michael Angelo. On The stone are engraved seven women. You must have the aid of a glass in order to distinguish the forms of all. Another intaglio is spoken of — the figure is that of the good Hercules. By the aid of glasses you can distinguish the interlacing muscles, and count every separate hair on the eyebrows. Mr. Phillips again speaks of a stone 20in. long and lOin. wide which contained a whole treatise on mathematics, which, would be perfectly illegible without" glasses. Wow, our author says, if we are unable to see and read these minute details without glasses, you may suppose the men who did the engraving had pretty strong spectacles. " The Emperor Nero, who was short-sighted, occupied the Imperial box at the Coliseum, and to look down into the arena — a space covering six acres, the area of the Coliseum — was obliged, as Pliny says, to look I through a ring with a gem in it — no [ doubt a concave glass — to see more clearly the sword-play of the gladiators. Again, we read of Mauritius, who stood on the promontory of his island and could sweep over the sea with an optical instrument to watch the ships of the enemy. This tells us that the telescope is not a modern invention."

Our first positive knowledge of spectacles is gathered from the writings of Koger Bacon, who died in 1292. Bacon says:— "This instrument (a plano-convex glass, or large segment of a sphere) is useful to old men and to those who have weak eyeß, for they may see the smallest letters sufficiently magnified." — Journal of the Franklin Institute.