Scarcely less remarkable are the other examples of glass from Canosa exhibited in the same case. Here may be seen two bowls built up with coils of little rods, each rod containing an opaque white string in the centre of a clear base; these, as I have mentioned, are identical with the bowls, now in the Assyrian Department, brought back by Layard from Nineveh. In addition to these varied types of glass there were found in the same tombs some large dishes of _millefiori_ ware, and finally a large flat bowl of white glass with a somewhat rude pattern cut with the wheel, and with a row of spurs projecting from near the edge. This, as will be seen further on, is a method of decoration more common at a time of artistic decline, in the third and fourth centuries. Quite Greek in character are the strange little unguent pots that come from Cyprus. On the cup-like overlapping lid of one in the British Museum may be seen outlined in black, apparently between two layers of glass, a little cupid bearing a bunch of grapes. Although many of these little pots have lately been found in Cyprus, it is only in a few cases that the design on the lid, so truly Greek in style, has been preserved. There is some reason to believe that when the use of the blowing-tube was first introduced it was applied as a supplement to a moulding process. The hollow vesicle of glass—the _paraison_, to use the old French word—was blown into a more or less hemispherical mould, and the irregularities of the resulting bowl were then removed by grinding on a wheel. At any rate, during what we may call the Alexandrian period, a bowl of simple outline, whether shallow or deep, is the characteristic form. In the case of certain dishes in the shape of a boat, the wheel has played a still more important part. For the personal adornment of their women the Greeks continued to make a variety of small objects of glass, more or less on the old lines. We find, too, intaglios engraved on glass of various and often most exquisite tints at least as early as the fourth century B.C. In the preparation of these pastes the greatest attention was paid to the exact imitation of precious stones. At a somewhat later date, in the second century B.C., cameos in high relief cast in glass pastes of various colours came into vogue. The ‘mother’ design was modelled in clay, and upon this matrix the mould in which the glass was to be cast was formed. These early glass cameos are compared by the late Dr. Murray to the circular, moulded reliefs on the black pottery of this period, and he points out that they apparently preceded the large reliefs engraved on stones of the onyx family which were so much in favour a little later (_Greek Archæology_, p. 160). It must be borne in mind that neither in the case of cameo or intaglio could the paste copy be made directly from the original stone. The paste gem, thus moulded, was often carefully finished by hand. EARLY ROMAN GLASS