Among the beads made from hollow tubes there is one type, generally of commanding size, which may perhaps claim some attention. I refer to the great Chevron Beads, the _Perle a rosette_ of the Italians, _à propos_ of the origin and date of which a not insignificant literature has accumulated. I treat of them here, as in by far the larger number of instances, if not in all cases, these beads can be undoubtedly recognised as of Venetian manufacture. These chevron beads have been made from canes built up of concentric layers of coloured glass. They have attracted exceptional attention from the fact that examples have been found in so many widely separated parts of the world, and from their possessing, in some cases, apparently well founded claims to great age. The arrangement and the succession of the colours in the glass is in every case practically identical. The canes from which they were formed have been built up of three main concentric layers, externally a deep cobalt blue, then an opaque brick red, and in the centre a tube of pale green transparent glass; these main layers are divided by thinner ones of opaque white glass, and the dividing surfaces have been worked into a series of chevrons or zig-zags (these chevrons are in all cases, I think, twelve in number) so as to present a star-like pattern on a cross section. The only variations on this general type are as follows: the chevrons are, in a few cases, dragged laterally so as to resemble the teeth of a circular saw; the central tube of transparent glass is sometimes divided by a zig-zag layer of opaque white; and, very rarely, the external layer is green instead of blue. In shape and size, however, these chevron beads show wide divergences: in length they may vary from two and a half inches to as little as a third of an inch, and the diameter, though generally less, is in a few cases greater, than the length. The extremities in some of the larger and presumably older specimens are facetted, that is to say, ground down to a pyramidal form. What, however, we may call the normal type, is of a cylindrical shape with rounded ends (Plate XV. 2). These _perle a rosette_ are at the present day made at Murano for the African market. When in the spring of 1903 I visited the glass-works of the ‘Venice and Murano Company,’ I was shown by Signor Andrea Rioda specimens both of these beads and of the canes from which they are prepared; the company was at that time executing a large order from a French firm, for the Congo. This work, however, is not generally undertaken by the firms that make the ordinary _conterie_, for these large beads have to be separately ground and polished on a wheel—an important point, as we shall see. They have been made at Murano, the local tradition affirms, from time without memory.