428 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



' glass ' in King James's version is not as clear as in some of the later 

 renderings. The passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians if 

 read : " As yet we see things dimly, reflected as in a mirror, but then 

 face to face," makes the sense plain. As looking-glasses, to use this 

 term by anticipation, were generally made of steel or some other metal, 

 they readily became tarnished, even when of the best quality; hence 

 the man who beheld his face ' in a glass ' rarely got a distinct image, 

 and thus would readily forget the lineaments of his countenance. 

 That window glass, such as is now in common use, was slow to gain 

 currency is shown by the little panes in many old buildings in Europe. 

 They are usually round or nearly so, and so small that one of them can 

 easily be held between the tips of the ringers and the thumb. That 

 this form of window glass first came into vogue in Germany is evident 

 from the name disk (Scheibe) by which a pane of glass is still desig- 

 nated, no matter what its shape. 



That ancient customs are still practised by primitive tribes is in- 

 terestingly shown by the two following incidents. In the Iliad Ave are 

 told that when Asklepias ' saw the wound where the bitter arrow had 

 lighted he sucked out the blood,' and so forth. In his recent work on 

 the Australian aborigines, John Mathew informs the reader that the 

 doctor or sacred man made a practise of sucking the part ailected. He 

 then proceeds : " There seems to be some efficacy in the sucking, for a 

 friend of mine who was suffering severely from an inveterate, inflamed 

 eye allowed a black 'doctor' to mouth the eyeball, and the result of 

 the treatment was immediate relief and speedy cure." A further paral- 

 lelism between the rise and practise of the healing art and the priestly 

 class, although in Greece the connection was less close than elsewhere 

 and did not long continue, i"s shown by this extract. 



The reading habit is essentially modern and may be said to date 

 from the rise of periodicals, comparatively few of which are more than 

 half a century old. The invention of spectacles and that of printing 

 were very nearly coeval. Until that date literary instruction was largely 

 a matter of dictation, repetition and memorizing, as is still the case 

 in many parts of the world. Among the ancient Greeks and Komans 

 the memory was trained to a far greater extent than with us. In the 

 literature of the former there is constantly evident a sort of distrust 

 of the written page. It could not reflect the vivifying power of the 

 living voice. It seems to have been a common thing for Greek youths 

 to learn Homer by heart, huge as the task would be to us. Knowledge 

 was to be elicited by discussion, by the dialectic method, by question 

 and answer. Intellectual training was almost exclusively rhetorical. 

 Taking into consideration, therefore, the fact that eyes were not needed 

 for the manufacture and use of instruments of precision and that the 

 printed page did not exist, we can easily understand that spectacles 

 were not greatly missed. 



