Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

[375] nut-shell. Now, this is imperceptible to the ordinary eye. You have seen the Declaration of Independence in the compass of a quarter of a dollar, written with glasses. I have to-day a paper at home, as long as half my hand, on which was photographed the whole contents of a London newspaper. It was put under a dove's wing, and sent into Paris, where they enlarged it, and read the news. This copy of the Iliad must have been made by some such process.

In the Roman theatre,--the Coliseum, which could seat a hundred thousand people,--the emperor's box, raised to the highest tier, bore about the same proportion to the space as this stand does to this hall; and to look down to the centre of a six-acre lot, was to look a considerable distance. ( “Considerable,” by the way, is not a Yankee word. Lord Chesterfield uses it in his letters to his son, so it has a good English origin.) Pliny says that Nero the tyrant had a ring with a gem in it, which he looked through, and watched the swordplay of the gladiators,--men who killed each other to amuse the people,--more clearly than with the naked eye. So Nero had an opera-glass.

So Mauritius the Sicilian stood on the promontory of his island, and could sweep over the entire sea to the coast of Africa with his nauscopite, which is a word derived from two Greek words, meaning “to see a ship.” Evidently Mauritius, who was a pirate, had a marine telescope.

You may visit Dr. Abbot's museum, where you will see the ring of Cheops. Bunsen puts him five hundred years before Christ. The signet of the ring is about the size of a quarter of a dollar, and the engraving is invisible without the aid of glasses. No mall was ever shown into the cabinets of gems in Italy without being furnished with a microscope to look at them. It would be