Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/487

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been occupied only with the concluding part of the manufacture, which was the making up of the cloth into the articles for which it was so well fitted by its strength, closeness and durability. He was a maker of tents of Cilician camlet, or goat's-hair cloth,—a business which, in its character and implements, more resembled that of a sail-maker than any other common trade in this country. The details of the work must have consisted in cutting the camlet of the shape required for each part of the tent, and sewing it together into the large pieces, which were then ready to be transported, and to form, when hung on tent-poles, the habitations of the desert-wanderers.


This illustration of Saul's trade is from Hug's Introduction, Vol. II. note on § 85, pp. 328, 329, original, § 80, pp. 335, 336, translation. On the manufacture of this cloth, see Gloss. Basil, sub voc. [Greek: Kilikios tragos], &c. "Cilician goat,—a rough fellow;—for there are such goats in Cilicia; whence also, things made of their hair are called ciliciaia?]." He quotes also Hesychius, Suidas, and Salmasius in Solinum, p. 347. As to the use of the cloths in war and navigation, he refers to Vegetius, De re milit. IV. 6, and Servius in Georgica III. 312.—The passage in Pliny, showing their use by the Nomadic tribes of Syria and Mesopotamia for shepherd's tents, is in his Nat. Hist., VI. 28. "Nomadas infestatoresque Chaldaeorum, Scenitae claudunt, et ipsi vagi, sed a tabernaculis cognominati quae ciliciis metantur, ubi libuit." The reading of this passage which I have adopted is from the Leyden Hackian edition of Pliny, which differs slightly from that followed by Hug, as the critical will perceive. Hemsen quotes this note almost verbatim from Hug. (Hemsen's "Apostel Paulus," page 4.)

The particular species or variety of goat, which is thus described as anciently inhabiting the mountains of Cilicia, can not now be distinctly ascertained, because no scientific traveler has ever made observations on the animals of that region, owing to the many difficulties in the way of any exploration of Asia Minor, under the barbarous Ottoman sway. Neither Griffith's Cuvier nor Turton's Linnaeus contains any reference to Cilicia, as inhabited by any species or variety of the genus Capra. The nearest approach to certainty, that can be made with so few data, is the reasonable conjecture that the Cilician goat was a variety of the species Capra Aegagrus, to which the common domestic goat belongs, and which includes several remarkable varieties,—at least six being well ascertained. There are few of my readers, probably, who are not familiar with the descriptions and pictures of the famous Angora goat, which is one of these varieties, and is well-known for its long, soft, silky hair, which is to this day used in the manufacture of a sort of camlet, in the place where it is found, which is Angora and the region around it, from the Halys to the Sangarius. This tract of country is in Asia Minor, only three or four hundred miles north of Cilicia, and therefore at once suggests the probability of the Cilician goat being something very much like the Angora goat. (See Mod. Trav. III. p. 339.) On the other side of Cilicia also, in Syria, there is an equally remarkable variety of the goat, with similar long, silky hair, used for the same manufacture. Now Cilicia, being directly on the shortest route from Angora to Syria, and half-way between both, might very naturally be supposed to have another variety of the Capra Aegagrus, between the Angoran and the Syrian variety, and resembling both in the common characteristic of long shaggy or silky hair; and there can be no reasonable doubt that future scientific observation will show that the Cilician goat forms another well-marked variety of this widely diffused species, which, wherever it inhabits the mountains of the warm regions of Asia, always furnishes this beautiful product, of which we have another splendid and familiar specimen in the Tibet and Cashmere goats, whose fleeces are worth more than their weight in gold. The hair of the Syrian and Cilician goats, however, is of a much coarser character, producing a much coarser and stouter fibre for the cloth.

On the subject of Paul's trade, the learned and usually accurate Michaelis was led into a very great error, by taking up too hastily a conjecture founded on a misappre-