The blow-pipe is not so old an implement as the potter’s wheel, but it seems to have been used 5000 years ago, in Egypt. Pliny first gave the fanciful account of Phoenician mariners accidentally fusing carbonate of soda with sea-sand; Dr. Johnson commented on that as follows: “Who, when he saw the first sand or ashes by a casual intenseness of heat melted into a metallic form, rugged with excrescences, and clouded with impurities, would have imagined that in this shapeless lump lay concealed so many conveniences of life as would in time constitute a great part of the happiness of the world? Yet by some such fortuitous liquefaction was mankind taught to procure a body at once in a high degree solid and transparent; which might admit the light of the sun and exclude the violence of the wind; which might extend the view of the philosopher to new ranges of existence, supply the decays of nature, and succour old age with subsidiary sight.”

Perhaps the first glassware was cast, or moulded, and there is no record of when or where the blow-pipe was first used. Ancient glass beads were probably made by moulding: probably the first glass ever made in England (the windows at Wearmouth Church, in A.D. 675) was cast. Not until the sixteenth century, apparently, was any blown glass made in England, and none of it remains both extant and intact; collectors are fortunate who come upon a piece of date so early as the first half of the seventeenth century, even; but from the last few years of the seventeenth century to the first few years of the nineteenth century inclusive, English and Irish blown glass was the best in the world. Therefore it is the blown pieces which are the most characteristic, whether blown only or blown and afterwards engraved or cut. And the blown pieces, being intended for use, are the more numerous, and the more readily collected; the cut and engraved pieces, being for ornament, were more costly, and therefore fewer—though perhaps they have been more carefully preserved.

Drinking glasses are the most favoured aim of collectors and at present are the old glass objects most frequently offered, but as glass-collecting becomes more popular other glass objects are brought out of cupboards and places where they have been lying neglected; and my counsel is that a collector should acquire any piece of old blown-glass ware which he can.