June 1, 1864.] THE TECHNOLOGIST. 



ON GRANITE AND ITS USES. 505 



fashions them, and the tools which specially belong to it as a particular 

 craft. Such a museum should also include illustrations of the progress 

 ox each industrial art from age to age ; of its dependence on the sister 

 arts, and the extent to which it ministers to them ; of its relation to the 

 products of our own country, and to those of foreign lands ; of the 

 amount of wealth which it consumes, circulates, and produces ; of its 

 healthfulness as a vocation for the different sexes and ages ; of its relation 

 to good morals, and the service which it can render the State by employing 

 the needy, increasing the comforts of the poor, advancing the civilisation 

 of all classes, adding to the material, intellectual, and moral prosperity 

 of the whole nation, and, through it, more or less of the entire world. 



Now, instead of attempting a formal catalogue of all the arts which 

 would thus be represented in an Industrial Museum, let us be content 

 on this occasion to see how it would deal with glass in the several rela- 

 tions referred to. In the first place, then, the museum itself might be 

 built of glass, like the Industrial Palace at Hyde Park in 1851, or the 

 present Palace at Sydenham. The raw materials of glass, arranged in 

 due order, would directly connect the museum with distant regions of 

 the globe, and with men of various nations and of still more various pro- 

 fessions. Thus, the sand used in glass-making is brought to Scotland 

 from the Isle of Wight, from North and South America, and from Aus- 

 tralia. The soda comes in part from our northern and western shores, 

 in part from Spain and the Levant, in part from the natron lakes of 

 Egypt : but most of the soda is made in our own country, by a complex 

 chemical process from common salt, which involves the consumption of 

 shiploads of sea salt from different parts of the world, of shiploads of 

 sulphur dug up in Sicily, of shiploads of chalk or limestone quarried in 

 England, and of shiploads and trnckloads of coal mined in our coal 

 districts. 



The potash of flint glass is extracted from wood-ashes for us by the 

 Americans, Canadians, and Russians. The lead of our flint glass is 

 mined and smelted in Lanarkshire, Dumfriesshire, and Cumberland. 

 The manganese, used both to bleach and to give a purple colour to 

 glass, is brought from England, Spain, America, and the Continent. The 

 copper used in staining it green, and the tin for white enamel, come 

 from Cornwall. The cobalt, so extensively employed in colouring glass 

 blue, is imported from the Saxon mines, or from those in the mountains 

 of Norway. The silver, which stains glass yellow and orange, may be 

 from Transylvania, Chili, or Peru, and the gold, which makes it ruby 

 red, from California. There is thus a whole fleet of ships, and an entire 

 battalion of sailors, engine-drivers, railway porters, colliers, quarrymen, 

 miners, metal workers, and others, waiting on the glass-maker. 



Again, the glass-work must be very carefully built by the mason and 

 bricklayer, and the potter must exercise his greatest skill in furnishing 

 suitable pots in which to melt the glass, and the brick-maker his skill 

 in providing suitable fire-bricks for the furnaces. 



VOL. iv. x x 



