Surely so much information has rarely been compressed into one print as we find in the main illustration to this part of Agricola’s text (Plate XXXVIII.). Here at one working-hole (_fenestrella_) we see a workman gathering the glass at the end of his _fistula_ or blowing-iron, another is shaping the gathering upon the marver at his foot, a third is vigorously blowing the _paraison_ to the required size, and a fourth is swinging another round his head. On the ground lie scattered moulds of various forms, and here, too, we may discover the forceps (_pucella_) used in shaping the glass. To the right, in the foreground, lies a large wooden case closely packed with glass vessels of various shapes: we can distinguish, I think, bottles, alembics, and some prunted cylinders, which may well be the _Krautstrünke_ of Mathesius. Above, to the right, the itinerant hawker marches off with a fresh supply of glass of all shapes arranged in an open-work crate strapped on his back. Finally, to the left, in a little office, the master discusses business with a customer over a foaming glass of beer—this last a truly German trait. Our other source of information for the German glass of the sixteenth century is found, of all places in the world, in a collection of so-called sermons written by the friend, table-companion, and biographer of Luther—Johann Mathesius (1504-1565). Mathesius, after leaving Wittenberg, settled as pastor at Joachimsthal, a famous mining centre on the southern slopes of the Erzgebirge. These _Sermons for Miners_[194] are a strange mixture of what to us seem fantastic analogies drawn from the Bible, with matter of an eminently practical nature relating to the crafts and occupations of his audience. The title of his fifteenth sermon will give some idea of how he treats the subject:—‘Of glass and the making of glass, and passages where it is mentioned in the Holy Writings, and how we may thereby call to mind both the fragility of our present bodies and the clearness and brilliancy of our bodies in the future state.’ A careful perusal of what both these writers have to say on the manufacture of glass leaves the general impression that in the first half of the sixteenth century Germany had not made much progress in that art. It is to Venice, in the first place, and then to Antwerp, that Mathesius turns for brilliant examples. At Murano, he tells us, they can actually make panes of glass ‘through which from one’s room one can see all that is passing in the street.’ So too, he says, it is in that town and in Antwerp that is made the finest _schmelzglas_ of all colours used by the goldsmith—above all the mysterious _ritzkel_.[195]