from each fish, by opening a vessel situated in its throat. This liquid, when extracted, was mixed with a sufficient quantity of salt to prevent putrefaction. It was then diluted with five or six times as much water, and kept moderately hot in leaden or tin vessels for the space of ten days, during which time it was frequently skimmed, in order to separate all impurities. In dyeing, the wool was washed, immersed and kept in the liquid for five hours. It was then taken out, carded, and again immersed for a sufficient length of time for all the colouring matter to be extracted from the liquid. For the production of particular shades of colour, various salts were added. The colour of the Tyrian purple itself appears to have been similar to that of blood. This author also says, that the Tyrians first dyed their wool in the liquor of the purpura, and afterwards in that of the buccinum. We find allusions to this practice in several passages of the sacred writings. Horace also says:

And again:

"Muricibus Tyriis iteratæ vellera lanæ."

"Te bis Afro Murice tinctæ Vestiunt lanæ."

The purple mentioned in Exodus was probably that dyed by the Tyrians. Ezekiel, in his prophecy against Tyre, says: "Fine linen with broidered work from Egypt, was that which thou spreadest forth to be thy sail; blue and purple from the isles of Elishah was that which covered thee." It is generally supposed, that by Elishah, Elis, on the western coast of the Greek Peloponnesus, was referred to: hence it would appear that the Tyrians, in the time of Ezekiel, obtained their supply of shell-fish for dyeing purple from the coast of Greece. This celebrated colour was restricted by the ancients to the sacred person and palace of the emperor; and the penalties of treason were denounced against the ambitious subject who dared to usurp the prerogative of the throne.

CHAPTER V.

Silk.

"She sets to work millions of spinning worms,

That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk,
To deck her sons."

"Let Asia's woods

Untended, yield the vegetable fleece,
And let the little insect-artist form,
On higher life intent, its silken tomb."

MILTON.

THOMSON.

ILK-WORMS,—the most precious of insects,whose produce holds so important a place amongst the luxuries of modern life, were first rendered serviceable to man by the Chinese, about two thousand seven hundred years before the ChrisTheir most ancient authorities repre

tian era.

sent the Empresses of China, as surrounded by their women, engaged in the occupation of hatching and rearing silk-worms, and in weaving tissues from their produce. To the empress Seeling-shee, the consort of Hoang-tee, is ascribed the honour of having first observed the silk produced by the worms, of unravel

ling their cloth.*

cocoons, and working the fine filament into a web of

From China, the art of rearing silk-worms passed into India and Persia. The production of silk was unknown in Europe, however, until the middle of the sixth century, when two monks, who had long resided in China, succeeded in carrying some of the eggs of the insect, concealed in a hollow cane, to Constantinople; where, under their directions, the eggs were hatched by artificial heat: the worms were fed by leaves of the mulberry tree; they lived and laboured, and, by the use of proper means, the race was propagated and multiplied. This knowledge, under the emperor Justinian, became productive of a new and important branch of industry to the European nations. Manufactories were established in Athens, Thebes, and Corinth, but, until the twelfth century, Greece appears to have been the only country in Europe in which the art was practised.†

About 1130, Roger II, king of Sicily, established a silk manufactory at Palermo, and another in Calabria, managed by workmen taken as slaves from Athens and Corinth, of which cities he had made a conquest in his expedition to the Holy Land. By degrees the rest of Italy and Spain learned from the Sicilians and

* For an account of the invention, manufacture, and general use of silk in China, vide Du Halde's Description Geographique, Historique, et Physique de l'Empier de la Chine.

† A species of silk-worm, common in the forests both of Asia and Europe, was cultivated in the little island of Ceos, near the coast of Attica. A thin gauze was procured from their webs; and this Cean manufacture, the invention of a woman, for female use, was long admired both in the east and at Rome.The silks, which had been closely woven in China, were sometimes unravelled by the Phoenician women, and the precious materials were multiplied by a looser texture, and the intermixture of linen threads.-On the texture, colours, names, and use of the silk, half silk, and linen garments of the ancients, see the researches of the learned Salmasius.

Calabrians the management of the silk-worm, and the working of the silk. The art of rearing these insects did not reach France until after the reign of Charles VIII, when the white mulberry tree, and a few silk-worms, were introduced into Dauphiny by some noblemen, on their return from the conquest of Naples. It was not, however, until 1654, that they began successfully to produce the silk itself, when Traucat, a common gardener of Nismes, laid the foundation of a nursery of white mulberry trees, and with such success as to enable them to be propagated within a few years over all the southern provinces of France.*

It is uncertain at what period the use of silk was introduced among the Romans; but it was most probably in the time of Pompey and Julius Cæsar. So great, however, was its rarity, that it was sometimes sold for its equal weight in gold; and, even in the time of Aurelian, in the year 275, it was so expensive, that he is said to have refused his empress's particular request for a silken robe, on account of the price being so great. are informed by Tacitus, that a law was passed in the beginning of the reign of Tiberius, that no man should disgrace himself by wearing a silken garment. The profligate Heliogabalus, however, set aside this law, and was the first of the Roman emperors who wore a dress (holosericum) composed entirely of silk. After this,

We

"The enormous quantity of this material used in England alone, amounting in each year to more than four millions of pounds' weight. Fourteen thousand millions of animated creatures annually live and die to supply this little corner of the world with an article of luxury. If astonishment be excited at this fact, let us extend our view into China, and survey the dense population of its widely spread region, who, from the emperor on his throne to the peasant in the lowly hut, are indebted for their clothing to the labour of the silk-worm."-Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia.

+ "Ne vestis serica viros fœdaret."-Annal. 1. ii. c. 33.

the custom of wearing silk soon became general among the wealthy citizens of Rome. As the demand for silk increased, efforts were made to import larger quantities, and the price of it gradually declined, for in the time of Ammianus Marcellinus, silk appears to have been worn even by the lowest classes."

The art of spinning, throwing, and weaving silk, was introduced into England at the commencement of the fifteenth century; but silk appears to have been used by persons of distinction two centuries previously for in the year 1251, at the marriage of Margaret, daughter of Henry III, a thousand English knights appeared in cointises of silk.† The manufacture of silk was first practised in England in the reign of Henry IV, by a company in London, called silk-women; the articles produced consisted of laces, ribbons, and similar narrow fabrics, and these in no great quantities; but about the year 1480, men began to engage in the manufacture. Henry VIII wore the first pair of silk stockings in England, these were knitted; and in the latter years of the reign of Elizabeth, silk stockings were her only wear.§ About

* Am. Marcel. lib. xviii. c. 6. The historian Pausanias was the first who described the silk-worm. Before his time, the ancients imagined that silk was the produce of the trees of the Seres or Chinese. For an interesting account of the introduction of the seric insect into Europe, the reader is referred to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

+ Matthew Paris.

By statute 33 Henry VIII, a person whose wife wore a silk gown was bound to find a charger for government.

§ It is related by Howell, in his History of the World, (vol. ii. p. 222) that queen Elizabeth, in the year 1561, was presented with a pair of black knit silk stockings, by Mistress Montague, her silk-woman, at which she was SO much delighted that she thenceforth never condescended to wear those of cloth. It might have been supposed that Elizabeth's inordinate fondness for dress would have induced her to give every encouragement to the manufacture of so elegant a fabric as silk: it does not, however, appear that much progress was made in it during her reign. Content, probably, with her own acquisition, she might be desirous that the more becoming silken texture should remain a regal privi