Page:Architectural Review and American Builders' Journal, Volume 1, 1869.djvu/77

 1868.] Stained Glass. 57 dye them in every color, and afterwards make the most beautiful table-tops, by inlaying the different colored bits of these woods, so as to form flowers, animals, and landscapes. This art is brought to great perfection. If Maple were an expensive foreign wood, it would, no doubt, be a great favorite with us for fine chamber furniture, but being not an exotic, but only a familiar native, we do not appreciate it ; and our people go to Europe, and buy elegant Mar- quetrie tables and cabinets at immense prices, not knowing that the beautiful colored wood that forms the marvellous inlaid panels, or the choice table-top, even to the Ebony, is (at home) our own unassuming but beautiful Maple. Like our other woods, the Maple is fast disappearing, from ignorant waste. The Sugar Maple is being preserved, from the fact that it is profitable for its sap, of which the^y make sugar in New York and the New England States. The Maple, which is planted for shade and ornament in the cities, is of no use to mechanics, as it does not grow to any available size. In another article, we shall describe the woods, both native and foreign, which are used for furniture, and so we end this preliminary glance. STAINED GLASS. By John Gibson.* GLASS of the various kinds, white and colored, plain and ornamental, is so intimately connected with ai'chitec- ture and building, that a short descrip- tion of its origin, history, and uses may not be uninteresting to the readers of this Journal ; not that much new can be said on so old a subject, its origin being of such antiquity that but little is known of its first discovery. Pliny, the Roman historian, relates what is supposed to be the origin. A ship laden with fossil alkali, having been driven ashore on the coast of Palestine, the sailors placed their cooking vessels on pieces of the alkali and lighting fires on the sand, the heat fused the alkali, which combining with the sand the result was a species of glass ; aud thus accident led to its dis- covery as an art.f There are other conjectures, such as the burning of bricks, which are more or less covered f As to nature's glass, "we have pitch stone, olivine or chrysolite, ohsidian, angite or pyoxene, leucite, and especially quartz, with its many varieties, massive crys- tal, rock crystal, flint, sard, amethyst, chrysoprase, cacholong, chalcedony, carnelian, onyx, jasper, and agate; and nature's glass-houses are the volcanoes. with a glazed coating if over-burnt and vitrified, which might originate the idea and lead to its discovery. It also may have originated from necessity, which, after all, is the great mother of invention in the arts and sciences : the necessity of a medium of admitting light and keeping out the storms from their dwellings may have been the incentive to devise a substance, which, after many failures, produced glass. What- ever may have been the cause, its history is of such remote antiquity, as to be lost in the obscurity of time. In sacred history we read of the ciystal and a molten looking-glass; and in one of the Egyptian Tombs is the representation of workmen engaged in glass-blowing, very little different from the mode of the present day, which is a proof that the ancient Egyptians were masters of the art. The origin of the art of coloring glass is also lost to us, owing to its antiquity, but, no doubt this was discovered soon after the making of glass; for as is natural to man, after a necessity has been snp- J. & G. H. Gibson, Stained Glass Manufacturers, No. 125 S. Eleventh street, Philadelphia.