ying glasses. "Cicero said that he had
seen the entire _Iliad_, which is a poem as large as the New
Testament, written on a skin so that it could be rolled up in the
compass of a nut shell;" it would have been impossible either to have
written this, or to have read it, without the aid of a magnifying
glass.

In Parma, a ring 2,000 years old is shown which once belonged to
Michael Angelo. On the stone are engraved the figures of seven women.
You must have the aid of a glass in order to distinguish the forms at
all. Another _intaglio_ is spoken of--the figure is that of the god
Hercules; by the aid of glasses, you can distinguish the interlacing
muscles and count every separate hair on the eyebrows. Mr. Phillips
again speaks of a stone 20 inches long and 10 wide containing a whole
treatise on mathematics, which would be perfectly illegible without
glasses. Now, our author says, if we are unable to read and see these
minute details without glasses, you may suppose the men who did the
engraving had pretty strong spectacles.

"The Emperor Nero, who was short sighted, occupied the imperial box at
the Coliseum, and, to look down into the arena, a space covering six
acres, the area of the Coliseum, was obliged, as Pliny says, to look
through a ring with a gem in it--no doubt a concave glass--to see more
clearly the sword play of the gladiators. Again, we read of Mauritius,
who stood on the promontory of his island and could sweep over the sea
with an optical instrument to watch the ships of the enemy. This tells
us that the telescope is not a modern invention."

Lord Kingsborough, speaking of the ancient Mexicans, says: "They were
acquainted with many scientific instruments of strange invention,
whether the telescope may not have been of the number is uncertain,
but the thirteenth plate of _Dupaix's Monuments_, part second, which
represents a man holding something of a similar nature to his eye,
affords reason to suppose that they knew how to improve the powers of
vision.

Our first positive knowledge of spectacles is gathered from the
writings of Roger Bacon, who died in 1292.[3] Bacon says: "This
instrument (a plano-convex glass or large segment of a sphere) is
useful to old men and to those who have weak eyes, for they may see
the smallest letters sufficiently magnified."

[Footnote 3: _Med. and Surg. Reporter_.]

Alexander de Spina, who died in 1313, had a pair of spectacles made
for himself by an optician who had t