THE TECHNOLOGIST. [June 1, 1864. 



508 ON GRANITE AND ITS USES. 



invalids may realise a Madeira at home, or, at least, throw away their 

 respirators, and be forgetful of the east wind ; at all events we have our 

 Crystal Palaces, which more than most human productions resemble 

 divine ones, inasmuch as they are at once as perfect as mechanical works 

 and pieces of engineering, as they are as works of beauty. 



Whilst in the Crystal Palace the lover of mathematical precision in 

 squaring sheets of glass, and in piecing them together in multiples of 

 the dimensions of each single sheet, a,nd the delighted calculator of the 

 proj)er length, breadth, and thickness of iron pillars, cross-ties, and 

 girders, might enjoy himself to the full ; the artist, blind to these things 

 which he could not see, though his eyes were open, might admire the 

 beautiful result, for him as causeless as the glory of a flower, which, 

 nevertheless, is realised in confoimity with mathematical and numerical 

 laws, as much more rigid than those observed in the construction of a 

 Crystal Palace as the glory of a flower exceeds the glory of the grandest 

 edifice that man can plan. 



Had I been privileged, as some of my friends were, to walk alone by 

 midsummer twilight through the long aisles and arcades of the first and 

 most famous Crystal Palace of 1851, I should not have paced its solitary 

 courts without thinking of it as an emblem of this earth, with its over- 

 arching, half-revealing, half-concealing sky, or without remembering 

 that St. Paul, spanning by a divine standard the horizon of man's 

 knowledge in all directions, declared that " here we see through (or in) 

 a glass darkly." This earth is for the industrial man a transparent bee- 

 hive ; for the sesthetical man, a covered garden and green-house, full of 

 flowers, and statues, and birds of song ; for the scientific man, a dark 

 diving-bell, with mere eyelets to admit the light, lying at the bottom of 

 the ocean, which he longs to explore ; and for all men, however thin 

 and invisible the walls at times may appear, it is a prison ; and, as 

 Shelley sang — 



" Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 

 Stains the white radiance of Eternity, 

 Until Death tramples it to fragments." 



Such are some of the modes in which the glass objects collected in 

 an Industrial Museum might instruct and interest its visitors, whatever 

 their tastes or inclinations. 



Pottery would have equally served to illustrate the idea and aims of 

 such a museum. It takes its name from the word " pot," by which is 

 generally understood a cooking-vessel ; but in its earlier and quite 

 innocent meaning it signified a drinking vessel, and is connected with 

 our terms " potion" and " potation." The French have borrowed from the 

 Greeks, and transferred to us the tei-m " Ceramic," to denote the art of the 

 potter. If those philologists are right who derive this word from the 

 ancient Hellenic name of a horn, i.e. a drinking horn, then potter's "ait 

 and Ceramic art have exactly the same signification. But both these 

 derivations, favoured by the French writers on the art under notice, 



