ONLY A PEBBLE. 27 



The North of Europe appreciated it still more slowly. 

 The royal palace of rich England could, in the year 1661 

 boast of glass windows only in the upper stories; the 

 lower were closed with shutters. 



Those Phoenicians who first made glass, did certainly 

 not anticipate that they had thus created a charm by 

 which man would hereafter obtain the most signal 

 triumphs in science. They were pleased with its bright 

 coloring, they fashioned it into graceful vessels, they shaped 

 it into a thousand forms, but they knew not that a glance 

 through the glassy pebble would open to their near-sighted 

 eye the wonders of the Universe. With the lens man 

 governs the whole world. He tells the rays of the 

 sun to come and to depart at his bidding; he scatters 

 them as he pleases and he binds them together, until 

 their united strength melts the very stone of stones, the 

 hardest of earthly bodies, the diamond. Near-sighted or 

 far-sighted, he takes a glass and the rays of light are 

 made to fall where he pleases, so that he may see what 

 Nature seemed to have denied him. What a progress 

 is this from the huge, unwieldy glass globe, filled with 

 water, of which Seneca speaks with wonder, and which the 

 Arab Al Hazem perhaps already employed to magnify 

 small objects ! Now the general on the battle-field, and 

 the bold sea-captain on the wide ocean, marshal their 

 wide-scattered forces by the aid of their glasses. But 

 the greatest of triumphs it accomplishes in the hands 

 of the Astronomer. The whole world lies before him; 

 with one glance he looks through unmeasured space and 

 into times unknown to man. The secrets of the Universe 



