These also come from Northern India. It would be useless to search for an early native origin for work of this kind. Were it, however, possible to find in India any glass that we could connect with the Turki Khanates of Bokhara and Samarkand, the old homes of the Mogul family, we should thereby be provided with a connecting link that would not unlikely carry us back to the Syrian enamelled glass of the fourteenth century (see above, p. 168). But nothing of the kind, as far as I know, has so far turned up in Hindustan. On the whole, this Mogul glass, in spite of the exceptional artistic and technical qualities of the specimens just described, belongs to that bastard school of Saracenic art that is prevalent generally in the north of India. Its artistic parentage may probably be traced back to Venice by way of Persia. Equally Persian in character are the four-sided bottles painted with figures and flowers, somewhat in the style of the Cashmiri lacquer. A remarkable series of little flasks of this character, formerly in the Marryat collection, may be seen in the Indian Department at South Kensington, where, however, they are described as ‘Indo-Dutch.’ It is certainly disappointing to find in India such a total absence of native glass with any claim to antiquity. But some consolation may be derived from the discovery—for discovery it may be called—made not many years ago, that in more than one part of Hindustan, native craftsmen were turning out vessels of glass by a strangely primitive method. Sir Purdon Clarke, who has always had at heart the maintenance of the native industries of the country on the old lines, tells me that this modern Indian glass was first noticed at Calcutta, and with some difficulty traced to Patna. Here, by the most primitive methods, the native workmen were turning out among other things imitations of European lamp-glasses. The furnace consisted of a series of elaborate passages hidden beneath a heap of ashes. These chambers were originally formed by a scaffolding of cardboard frames which, when the arrangement was completed, were set on fire.