IVJIO DISCOVERED THE ELECTRIC TRANSMISSION OF SPEECH? 239 
Smaller pieces are of corresponding beauty and value, and serve to show to what 
perfection modern science and skill have developed this very ancient branch of 
glass-making. The recent imitations by the same company, and by Salviati's, of 
Phoenician tear and toilet bottles so closely resemble the antique ones that anti- 
quarians may well be in despair to distinguish the new from the old, especially if 
the corrosions, fractures, and little marks of age have also been attempted. I 
showed Mr. Alexander Nesbitt a beautiful bowl of delicate blue tint, with small 
heads or faces interspersed in the material, recently made by the Venezia-Murano 
Company, so precisely like the antique Roman that, after a careful examination, 
he said", if a fragment of it had been brought to him in Rome, he would have 
sworn it was ancient glass. We may now fairly consider that the lost art of both 
old Rome and old Venice has been reconquered by modern enterprise, for the 
subtle differences that still exist in certain technical points and invention, appre- 
ciable now only on closest study, may soon entirely disappear, and Venice once 
more supply the marts of the world with the finest artistic glass in old and new 
shapes. Among her work there are now to be seen excellent reproductions of 
the Christian glass of the fourth and fifth centuries, found in tombs and the 
catacombs. These consist of dishes, cups, and goblets, with designs in gold-leaf, 
chiefly heads of saints, emblems, and Bible stories, imbedded in the glass itself, 
or placed in form of medallions between two layers of different colors, which are 
fused together in the furnace into one compact mass. — Italian Rambles. 
WHO DISCOVERED THE ELECTRIC TRANSMISSION OF SPEECH ? 
A book of absorbing public interest is announced shortly to appear in Eng- 
land and this country — a history of the telephone of Johann Phillipp Reis, with a 
biographical sketch of its inventor, by Professor Sylvanus P. Thompson. 
The telephone outranks all previous discoveries in its direct enlargement of 
human power. The telescope and microscope are its nearest compeers. The 
telegraph, beside it, is a clumsy mechanism. The telephone, which makes a 
whispering-gallery of the round earth, may well exert an influence on civiKzation, 
comparable with that of the railroad and steamship. Already the business cent- 
ers expand, and the values of city lands change, under the magic of an invention 
which places every man at every other man's ear. But this promise or prophecy 
of the telephone is not all that affects the interest of the American people. There 
is a menace in connection with its present history which justly awakens public 
concern. Rapacious hands have clutched the throat of the telephone, to extort 
oppressive tribute for every word which it utters. 
Professor Thompson's book, which treats exhaustively the early history of 
the telephone, is therefore not only of scientific but of social interest and import- 
ance. It establishes beyond honest doubt or question, by historical evidence, 
by the reproduction of original documents and illustrations, and by the public 
• ecords of scientific bodies, that PhiUp Reis discovered the electric transmission of 
