THE TECHNOLOGIST. [June 1, 1864. 



506 ON GKANITE AND ITS USES. 



Machinery is also needed to grind and mix the materials, and to move 

 the glass-cutting wheels, as well as for other purposes, so that the mill- 

 wright and mechanician, the engineer and carpenter, must lend their aid. 



Again, the tools employed in fashioning glass are chiefly of iron, and 

 the smith is needed for them ; nor will I detain you further by enume- 

 rating one by one the chemist to analyse, the artist to design, the 

 managers, financiers, and midtitude of unskilled labourers who must be 

 connected with a glass-work. I might, I think, without expending any 

 overplus of ingenuity, bring in all the other craftsmen under the wing 

 of the glass-maker, and if restricted by my superiors to the illustration 

 in the Industrial Museum only of glass-making, could include under 

 that art all other arts, because they are needful to it, as it is to 

 them. But my present motive in speaking thus is to make all perceive 

 how full of profit, interest, and instruction an Industrial Museum could 

 not but be to every honest, open-eyed visitor, no matter what his or her 

 rank, vocation, tastes, or sympathies were, provided only there was some 

 love of mankind in the heart, and some power of perception acting 

 through the brain. 



Take this matter of glass in proof thereof. Under what immeasur- 

 able obligations are all sections of mankind to the glass-maker, and with 

 what interest should we study the properties of glass. But for the glass- 

 maker, astronomy woidd now be but little advanced beyond its condition 

 in the days of the Chaldean shepherds ; and in cloudy climates like our 

 own, the great Newtons, and Hookes, Flamsteeds, and Herschels, who 

 have triumphed by their optical instruments over all the gloom of our 

 sullen heavens, would have abandoned to the lonely herdsman under 

 cloudless eastern skies a science forbidden to them, or would have 

 wasted their days in vain wishes that they had been called like David 

 to follow upon Syrian hills "the ewes great with young." 



But for the glass-maker, optics would be but the shadow of what it 

 is. The telescope, the microscope, and the prism might never have been, 

 and we might still be profoundly ignorant of the wonderful properties 

 of light, and literally walking in darkness. 



But for the glass-maker, the chemist would have remained an 

 anomalous compound of the cook and the blacksmith, boiling and 

 distilling in opaque vessels, through whose walls nothing could be seen, 

 and blinding himself by staring into a furnace, where the changes which 

 its heat was producing on substances exposed to its flames could not be 

 traced otherwise than most imperfectly. Chemistry may, in truth, so 

 far as the greater part.of it is concerned, be defined as the " science of 

 the glass vessel.'' 



Natural philosophy, however, is scarcely less indebted than chemistry 

 to the wonderful properties of glass. But for the glass-maker, there 

 would be no transparent air pump, and, as a result, no satisfying know- 

 ledge of the air, and only a maimed and imperfect science of pneumatics 

 and the gases. 



