Many years ago when I was a child my aunt went to Italy and came back from visiting Vesuvius the volcano (which was and may still be giving off smoke) and in her memorabilia she had a piece of natural glass. It is a misshapen, chunky, slightly pale pink in places, hard lump of glass formed on the volcano’s side which she picked up when she climbed to the top.
I can imagine objects like this and many others fascinating early people, how they used it and tried to understand it. I can see people grinding this clear material down, and finding some of them concave and convex enough to alter the perspective of objects they could see through them. Just as others might have found oil deposits and found the sticky substance could burn, or came across rocks that gave up their pigments so they could colour their drawings.
This idea of investigating the things of the world, breaking them down, using them, mixing them together is second nature to us now but there would have been a time when this was a new idea, a new way of looking at the world. It is a brilliant technique that has made our cultures possible.