THE LOST ARTS.

Westport Times, Volume VII, Issue 1101, 26 August 1873, Page 3

THE LOST ARTS.

Cicero said that he had seen the entire Iliad, which is a poem as largo as the New Testament, written on skin so that it cotild be rolled up in the compass of a nut shell. Now this is imperceptible to the ordinary eye. Very recently the Whole contents of a London newspaper Were photographed on a paper half as long as the hand It was put under a dove's wing and stmt to Paris, where they enlarged it and read the news. This copy of Iliad must have been made by some such process. Pliny says that Nero, the tyrant, had a ring with a gem in it which he looked through and Watched the sword play of the gladiators more clearly than with the naked eye. So Nero had an opera glass. Mauritius, the Italian, stood on the promontory of his island and could sweep over the entire sea to the coast of Africa with his iiauscopite, which is a word derived from two Greek words meaning to see a ship. Evidently Mauritius, who was a pirate, had a marine telescope. The signet of a ring in Dr Abbot's museum said to belong to Cheops, who lived five hundred years before Christ, is about the size of a quarter of a dollar, and the engraving is invisible without the aid of glasses. In Parma is shown a.gem once worn on the finger of Michael Angelo, of which the eugraving is two thousand years old, in which there are the figures of seven women. A glass is needed to distinguish the forms at all. Layard says he would be unable to read the engravings on Nineveh without strong spectacles, they are so extremely small. Rawlinson brought home a stone about twenty inches long and ten Wide, containing an entire treatise on mathematics. It would be perfectly illegible without glasses. Now, if we are unable to read it without glasses, you may suppose that the man who engraved it had pretty strong spectacles. So, the microscope, instead of dating From our time, finds its brothers in the Books of Moses—and these are infant brothers.