No method of glass working has probably excited more attention than the wonderfully minute mosaics found scattered over the world both in beads and amulets. Old writers have exhausted their ingenuity in conjecturing the secret of their manufacture. Many of them are far too minute for human eyes to have executed, but like many other marvels the explanation is simple when once discovered. They were made (and are now successfully imitated in Murano) by arranging long slender glass rods of various colors so as to form a pattern, a picture, or the letters of a name, and then fusing them together and while still warm the rod or cane so formed could be drawn out to almost any length, the pattern becoming perhaps microscopically small, but always retaining its distinctiveness. A tube of glass treated in the same manner never loses a minute hole in the middle. Thin slices cut off such a rod would present on each side (face) the exact picture (just as the pattern appears when slicing a cucumber) or pattern originally arranged. When this idea had been once suggested, thousands of patterns could have been invented, and slices from these rods placed in liquid blue or other colored glass, and cast in a mould and ground into shape, gave rise to the endless combinations of Greek or Roman workers--The Millefiori glass of the Venetian republic was simply a revival of this old industry.... Under the Ptolemies the Egyptians acquired a rare perfection in mosaic! We have, so far as I know, no Roman mosaic or millefiori glass antedating the reign of Augustus. It is in the Augustan age that we first learn the name of a mosaic glass artist, Proculus of Perinthus, to whom the Alexandrian merchants erected a statue.