and approved. Certainly this
must be admitted to be a most noteworthy case of 'l'heredite dans
l'honneur.'

The new 'societe' has greatly extended and strengthened its operations
since 1831. The works at Tour-la-ville have been abandoned, the site
sold, and the workmen transferred to St.-Gobain. The glassworks of
St.-Quirin, the proprietors of which, on the abolition in 1804 of
privileges in general, had taken to making plate glass, were taken over
in 1858 by the St.-Gobain company, together with certain other works at
Mannheim in Germany and the chemical works at Cirey, and the 'societe'
assumed the name under which it is now known of 'The Company of Mirrors
and Chemical Products of St.-Gobain, Chauny, and Cirey.' In 1863 it
bought up the works at Stolberg near Aix-la-Chapelle in Rhenish Prussia,
in 1868 a minor manufactory at Montlucon in the Department of the
Allier, and finally during this current year 1889 it is establishing a
manufactory at Pisa in Italy.

The operations of the company, as it now exists, extend to six
manufactories of mirrors, six manufactories of chemicals, a mine of iron
pyrites, a salt mine, many thousand hectares of forests in this
department of the Aisne and in the province of Lorraine, and to a local
railway connecting St.-Gobain with Chauny, where the plate glass cast at
St.-Gobain is polished and the mirrors are silvered. At St.-Gobain,
besides the plate glass mirrors, glass is made for roofs, for floors,
for pavements, for optical instruments, including the finest lenses used
in the lighthouses of France. Here, as I have said, the lens was made
now used at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, from which, night
after night, a gigantic auroral ray of electric light leaps into space
and shoots for miles athwart the sky, to the inexpressible delight of
the gaping crowds below, and I hope to the edification of the world of
science.

Since 1870 the output of the company from its various manufactories has
more than doubled. It now amounts, in round numbers, to 800,000 square
metres a year of polished plate glass; to 500,000 square metres a year
of rough glass; to a million kilogrammes a year of blocks and castings
for floors and roofings, and to eighty thousand kilogrammes a year of
optical glasses of all sorts.

In the time of Louis XIV. and before Lucas de Nehou had made his
invention of plate glass, there was absolutely no public demand for what
in those days were called 'large mirrors