That the ancients were acquainted with wine is universally known. This knowledge must have been nearly coeval with the origin of society; for we are informed in Genesis that Noah, after the flood, planted a vineyard, and made wine, and got intoxicated by drinking the liquid which he had manufactured.[90] Beer also is a very old manufacture. It was in common use among the Egyptians in the time of Herodotus, who informs us that they made use of a kind of wine made from barley, because no vines grew in their country.[91] Tacitus informs us, that in his time it was the drink of the Germans.[92] Pliny informs us that it was made by the Gauls, and by other nations. He gives it the name of _cerevisia_ or _cervisia_; the name obviously alluding to the grain from which it was made. [90] Genesis ix. 20. [91] “Oinô d’ ek kritheôn pepoiêmenô diachreontai; ou gar sphi eisi en tê chôrê ampeloi.” Euterpe chap. 77. [92] De Moribus Germanorum, c. 23. “Potui humor ex hordeo aut frumento in quandam similitudinem vini corruptus.” But though the ancients seem acquainted with both wine and beer, there is no evidence of their having ever subjected these liquids to distillation, and of having collected the products. This would have furnished them with ardent spirits or alcohol, of which there is every reason to believe they were entirely ignorant. Indeed, the method employed by Dioscorides to obtain mercury from cinnabar, is a sufficient proof that the true process of distillation was unknown to them. He mixed cinnabar with iron filings, put the mixture into a pot, to the top of which a cover of stoneware was luted. Heat was applied to the pot, and when the process was at an end, the mercury was found adhering to the inside of the cover. Had they been aware of the method of distilling the quicksilver ore into a receiver, this imperfect mode of collecting only a small portion of the quicksilver, separated from the cinnabar, would never have been practised. Besides, there is not the smallest allusion to ardent spirits, either in the writings of the poets, historians, naturalists, or medical men of ancient Greece; a circumstance not to be accounted for had ardent spirits been known, and applied even to one-tenth of the uses to which they are put by the moderns. IX.--STONEWARE. The manufacture of stoneware vessels was known at a very early period of society. Frequent allusions to the potter’s wheel occur in the Old Testament, showing that the manufacture must have been familiar to the Jewish nation. The porcelain of the Chinese boasts of a very high antiquity indeed. We cannot doubt that the processes of the ancients were similar to those of the moderns, though I am not aware of any tolerably accurate account of them in any ancient author whatever. Moulds of plaster of Paris were used by the ancients to take casts precisely as at present.[93] [93] Plinii Hist. Nat. xxxv. 12.