It is not strange that, in this state of things, various legends should have been identified with the manufacture and its localities. Among these legends was that which ascribed to the furnace-fire the property of creating the monster called the Salamander. It was believed, too, that at certain times this wonderful being issued from his abode, and, as opportunity offered, carried back some victim to his fiery bed. The absence of workmen, who sometimes departed secretly for foreign lands, was always accounted for by the hypothesis that in some unguarded moment they had fallen a prey to the Salamander. Visitors, too, whose courage could sustain them, were directed to look through the bye-hole to the interior of the furnace, and no one failed to discover the monster coiled in his glowing bed, and glaring with fiery eyes upon the intruder, much to his discomfiture, and effectually as to his retreat. Some gallant knights, armed _cap-a-pie_, it is said, dared a combat with the fiery dragon, but always returned defeated; the important fact being doubtless then unknown or overlooked, that steel armor, being a rapid conductor of heat, would be likely to tempt a more ready approach of the fabled monster. There was another current notion, that glass was as easily rendered malleable as brittle, but that the workmen concealed the art, and the life of any one attempting the discovery was surely forfeited. An ancient writer on glass, "Isidorus," states that, in the reign of Tiberius, an artist, banished from Rome on political considerations, in his retirement discovered the art of rendering glass malleable; he ventured to return to Rome, in hopes of procuring a remission of his sentence, and a reward for his invention; the glass-makers, supposing their interest to be at stake, employed so powerful an influence with the Emperor (who was made to believe that the value of gold might be diminished by the discovery), that he caused the artist to be beheaded, and his secret died with him. "Blancourt" relates that, as late as the time of Louis XIII., an inventor having presented to Cardinal Richelieu a specimen of malleable glass of his own manufacture, he was rewarded by a sentence of perpetual imprisonment, lest the "vested interest" of French glass manufacturers might be injured by the discovery. Even at the present day the error is a popular one, that if the art of making glass malleable were made known, it would have the effect of closing nearly all the existing glass-works; while the truth is, that quite the reverse would be the result. Whenever the art of making glass malleable is made known, it will assuredly multiply the manufacture to a tenfold degree.