Wendell Phillips, in his lecture upon the Lost Arts, made some remarkable statements, to prove the superiority of the ancients in many things. "In every matter," he said, "that relates to invention--to use, or beauty, or form--we are borrowers. You may glance around the furniture of the palaces of Europe, and you may gather all these utensils of art or use, and when you have fixed the shape and forms in your mind, I will take you into the Museum of Naples, which gathers all remains of the domestic life of the Romans, and you shall not find a single one of these modern forms of art, or beauty, or use, that was not anticipated there. We have hardly added one single line or sweep of beauty to the antique.... I had heard that nothing had been observed in ancient times which could be called by the name of glass; that there had been merely attempts to imitate it. In Pompeii, a dozen miles south of Naples, which was covered with ashes eighteen hundred years ago, they broke into a room full of glass; there was ground glass, window glass, cut glass, and colored glass of every variety. It was undoubtedly a glass-makers factory.... Their imitations of gems deceived not only the lay people, but the connoisseurs were also cheated. Some of these imitations in later years have been discovered. The celebrated vase of the Geneva cathedral was considered a solid emerald. The Roman Catholic legend of it was that it was one of the treasures that the Queen of Sheba gave to Solomon, and that it was the identical cup out of which the Saviour ate the Last Supper. Columbus must have admired it. It was venerable in his day; it was death at that time for anybody to touch it but a Catholic priest. And when Napoleon besieged Genoa it was offered by the Jews to loan the senate three millions of dollars on that single article as security. Napoleon took it and carried it to France, and gave it to the Institute. In a fool's night, somewhat reluctantly, the scholars said, 'It is not a stone; we hardly know what it is.' Cicero said he had seen the entire Iliad, which is a poem as large as the New Testament, written on skin so that it could be rolled up in the compass of a nut-shell. Now this is imperceptible to the ordinary eye. You have seen the Declaration of Independence in the compass of a quarter of a dollar, written with the aid of glasses. I have a paper at home as long as half my hand, on which was photographed the whole contents of a London newspaper. It was put under a dove's wing and sent into Paris, where they enlarged it and read the news. That copy of the Iliad must have been made by some such process.... You may visit Dr. Abbott's Museum, where you will see the ring of Cheops. Bunsen puts him at five hundred years before Christ. The signet of the ring is about the size of a quarter of a dollar, and the engraving is invisible without the aid of glasses. No man was ever shown into the cabinet of gems in Italy without