History
Early varnishes were developed by mixing resin--pine sap, for example--with a solvent and applying them with a brush to get the golden and hardened effect one sees in today's varnishes. The ancient Egyptians were well acquainted with the art of varnishing, but its origin appears to be far east of there in India, China and Japan, where the practice of lacquer work, a species of varnish application, was known at a very early date. It has been claimed that Japan was acquainted with the art of lacquering by 500 or 600 B.C., but the majority of authorities place its first usage there to the 3rd century AD, as an art acquired from their neighbors, the Koreans. The Chinese and Indian peoples probably knew the art much earlier than the Japanese. Varnish and lacquer work are, however, generally treated in the arts as separate and distinct.
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“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)