The convivial customs of those days had no connection with the bottle, glass bottles being of a much later invention. Instead of having champagne or hock to be liberated from the bottle by the corkscrew at their feasts, the guests filled their drinking cups of gold, silver, crystal or beechwood from a two-handled amphora, a kind of earthenware pitcher, in which their choice wines used to be kept. The mouths of these vessels were stopped with wood and covered with a mastic, composed of pitch, chalk and oil to prevent air spoiling the wine or evaporation taking place. Columella, who wrote one of the earliest works on agriculture, gives directions for preparing this cement. The employment of cork for stoppers of bottles appears to have come into use about the seventeenth century, when glass bottles, of which no mention is made before the fifteenth century, began to be generally introduced. Before that period apothecaries used stoppers of wax, which were not only much more expensive but far more troublesome. In 1553, when C. Stephanus wrote his “Praedium Rusticum,” cork stoppers appear to have been very little known in France, for he states that this material was used principally for soles in that country. It is not known when cork and corks began to be generally used, but in that very amusing and instructive diary of Mr. Samuel Pepys the following entry is found: “14 July 1666” After having written to the Duke of York for money for the fleet, I went down Thames Street and there agreed for four or five tons of cork to be sent to the fleet, being a new device to make barricados with instead of junts (old cable),” but he does not inform us how the material answered.[32] [32] I have subsequently learned that this proved a failure.