The manufacture of the more elaborate forms of beads by means of the blow-pipe—the _suppialume_ process of the Venetians—spread slowly in the north. Doppelmayr (_op. cit._, p. 226) states that the use of ‘a little copper pipe fixed over a burning lamp’ for making small objects of glass was first taught at Nuremberg by one Abraham Fino, who came from Amsterdam in 1630. The Dutch, he says, had been taught the art by a Venetian. Kunckel, on the Pfauen-Insel, was occupied in making beads for exportation to West Africa by the newly founded Brandenburg African Company. In the early years of the eighteenth century the competition with Venice was keen, but in this branch the Italians seem to have held their own. Not so, however, in the kindred industry, the manufacture of glass pastes for artificial jewellery. Before the middle of the century, certain districts in Northern Bohemia obtained almost a monopoly in this art. These ‘Bohemian stones’ were made first at Turnau, by the Fischer brothers. This was early in the century; by 1786 there were, it is said, 443 master-workmen in the district thus employed. After that time the first place was held by the rival town of Steinschönau, to this day the centre of the industry (Lobmeyr, _Die Glas Industrie_, 1874, p. 135). CHAPTER XVIII DUTCH GLASS OF THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES In Holland the War of Independence does not seem to have interfered with the work of the glass furnaces already established in several of the towns by Altarists or Venetians. M. Schuermans, who has devoted a section of one of his letters to Holland (_op. cit._, vol. xxix. pp. 147-66), finds traces of the Italians at Bois-le-Duc, Middelburg, Haarlem, and Amsterdam. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century there were already at Amsterdam glass-houses managed by Dutchmen. M. Henri Havard has found in the registers of the States-General mention of two Dutch glass-makers who obtained at this time a privilege for fifteen years to make ‘glasses for Rhine wine in the shape of _roemers_ as well as beer glasses’ by certain new processes (_Oud Holland_, i. 182). For a time there was an active rivalry between the glass-makers of Amsterdam and Antwerp: at a later period the enterprising Liége family of the Bonhommes obtained a footing in several Dutch towns. But, as I have already said, the ‘green glass’ of the Rhine (not always necessarily green or even coloured) was from early times in favour in Holland, if indeed we are not to regard it as indigenous in the country. At a later period there is no doubt that most of the finer specimens were made there. It is glasses of this class, _roemers_ in the first place, but also tall ‘flutes,’ that we see so often in the works of the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. Those of a Venetian type, on the other hand, though by no means absent, are much rarer than in the contemporary paintings of the Flemish school.