It is not, however, from Italy, or even from Mediterranean lands, that the greater part of the Roman glass in our collections comes, and this is especially the case if we confine ourselves to the ‘hollow ware’—the true blown glass with which we are at present concerned. Already in Pliny’s time the new industry had spread to Spain and Gaul, where, before long, favoured no doubt by the cheapness of the fuel and of the raw materials, important centres of manufacture must have sprung up. We learn from Strabo that not long before his time the Britons obtained what little glass they used—this was confined, indeed, to articles of _verroterie_—from the Continent. But though we have no direct evidence on this point, there can be little doubt but that glass-works were established at least by the second century in the southern parts of England, and that, to give one example, the large globular and quadrangular urns of greenish glass were made at glass-works not far from the tombs in which they are found. Indeed, the bulk of this northern glass is of a sepulchral character. The large size and the graceful shapes of the well-known cinerary urns argue a complete mastery of the technical processes, and point to works on an extensive scale where large glass pots must have been in use. These spherical urns owe their preservation for the most part to the fact that they were enclosed in ‘coffins’ of lead or stone. The somewhat prosaic and ungainly square bottles that often replace them must have been blown into a mould of some kind. Little or no trace of local influence can be found in the shapes or the material of the glass made in the second, third, and fourth centuries in Gaul, in Britain, or on the Rhine. In the Glass-Room in the British Museum, the large vessels of blown glass are chiefly of Gallic origin; the most important come from a collection made many years ago in the south-east of France. They may be compared with the Roman glass found in Britain exhibited in the Central Saloon. On the whole, these large glass urns are characteristic of the northern and western provinces. While they appear to be unknown in Greece and in the East, in the Roman columbaria they form a very small proportion of the urns ranged in the niches and along the shelves.