The circumstances of the first production of glass are shrouded in mystery. The ancient authors give us little or no trustworthy information on the subject. Pliny the Elder, our chief authority, tells us a strange tale which is credible neither from the archaeological nor from the technical standpoint. He says that a party of Phoenician saltpetre-merchants landed by the mouth of the river Belus in Phoenicia. They set about lighting a fire to cook a meal, and for want of stones on the beach they took some blocks of saltpetre from their cargo to rest their kettle on. The heat of the fire fused the sand and the saltpetre into a vitreous mass. The story is probably a pure myth. From a technical point of view it is extremely doubtful if an open wood fire on a beach would be sufficient to fuse the sand and the saltpetre ; while from the archaeological standpoint it is certain that glass was known long before the Phoenicians were trading in the Mediterranean. The whole myth is based on the fact that in Pliny's own time—the 1st century A.D.—and for many centuries before, the sands of the Belus were widely used for glass-production. No author anterior in date to Pliny tells us anything at all about the origin of glass ; later authors, even as recently as the middle of the 19th century, for the most part repeat blindly Pliny’s story.