Quite recently, in the immediate neighbourhood of Treviso, a deposit of these chevron beads has been discovered in a bank beside an open field; ‘bushel loads’ of fragments were extracted, but not a single perfect bead. They were without exception broken fragments, not improbably ‘wasters,’ thrown aside possibly by those who were employed in grinding them. Treviso, I may note, is a town of mills and swift-flowing streams—in fact, the nearest point to Venice where abundant water-power could be found. Unfortunately no light so far has been thrown upon the age of this curious deposit.[141] In general aspect, in the scheme of colour especially, there is something unmistakably African about these chevron beads. To say nothing of their exceptional size, they have little in common with any other type of polychrome bead, whether Egyptian, classical, or from Teutonic graves. I may at once say that I consider these _perle a rosette_ as essentially of Venetian origin, and made, above all, for the African market. How the industry arose, and whether the Venetians in this instance as in other cases took the place of earlier Byzantine or Syrian glass-workers, there is nothing to show. We know that the Alexandrians of Greek and Roman times, like the Phœnicians before them, traded with the native races of Central Africa. These beads have certainly been found in Egypt,[142] especially in Upper Egypt and Nubia; it is even said that some of the Soudanese tribes have succeeded in making passable imitations of them. It must be remembered that the Venetians, at least in later times, did not trade directly with inland and barbarous races. Their business was to deliver their merchandise at certain seaport towns where they had factories or agencies. The goods then fell into the hands of local merchants who distributed them by caravans or sent them on coastways in their ships. So the Arab traders of Egypt, reshipping the Venetian wares at Suez or other ports of the Red Sea, would carry them in their dhows to Zanzibar or India; and so again in later days the merchants of Amsterdam and London, who held at times vast stores of Venetian beads, distributed them in Dutch or English ships to the very extremities of the world. The trade in beads was very active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the present day, in the warehouses of Bevis Marks and Houndsditch, there is probably accumulated a larger stock of beads than in Venice itself.