Show QUEER MIRRORS OF OLD I 1 polished Polla hett metal plates used the L looking glasses of today to day looking glasses of old were highly polls polished hd metal plates they were small land and provided with a handle Grand adies in trusted their mirrors to the care cate of a female slave whose duty it was to keep them clean and free from stain or rust and hand them to her mistress when the latter required them the chinese and japanese formerly used mirrors made ot of a simple metallic plate the japanese had a story of the invention of tha taft mirror the sun goddess they said once upon a time got into a great rage about something and retired to a cavern vowing that she would never come out again As she was the mother of light her retirement put the whole earth in darkness the other gods and aud goddesses didell did all they could in order to persuade her to come out again and finally invented a mirror which they placed at the entrance of the cave the angry goddess looked at it and seeing as she thought another goddess whose beauty was equal to her own emerged mad with jealousy from her retreat and the land was once again illuminated by the light of the sun glass mirrors says the chicago herald are supposed to have been first used in sidon like almost everything else they were very dear for a long iong time after their introduction we read in a letter written in 1673 by colbert t to 0 count that even if mirrors had been manufactured in france at that i time nobody but the king icing would have been rich enough to buy one the annual manufacture in europe at the present time according to the latest statistics we have been able to set get is something like one million eight hundred and fifty thousand square yards of looking glass in the mirrors of today to day the light is reflected by a layer of silver or an amalgam of tin but a proportion of light is lost in the process of reflection and the image is less luminous than the original the value of a looking glass is u usually LIly estimated by the thickness of the glass glas because the thicker they are the he st stronger they must be but speaking scientifically thick glasses are defective fec tive because the outlines of the image reflected are less clearly defined there are really three reflections and consequently three images in every glass mirror one from the upper surface faaee of the glass the second from the I 1 lowar surface and the third from the metallic layer at the back an ideal mirror mirror is one with a perfectly flat suri face but it is only possible to obtain tills result jn jk comparatively small glasses the larger glasses do n not t ze elect a true image because it is n 0 T sib bible ae tomake to make them quite flat |