good number of threads, so as to work the cloths called polymita, was first taught in Alexandria; to divide by checks, in Gaul.[1]
The native botanical home of
Cotton
is in the East. India almost everywhere throughout her wide-spread countries, and many kingdoms of old, arrayed, as she still arrays herself, in cotton, which she gathered from a plant of the mallow family, that had its wild growth there; and in this same vegetable produce the lower orders of the people dwelling still further to the east were fain to clothe themselves.
Hemp,
a plant of the nettle tribe, and called by botanists "cannabis sativa," was of old well known in the far north of Germany, and all over the ancient Scandinavia. Full two thousand five hundred years ago, Herodotus[2] thus wrote of it: "Hemp grows in the country of the Scythians, which except in the thickness and height of the stalk, very much resembles flax; in the qualities mentioned, however, the hemp is much superior. It grows in a wild state, and is also cultivated. The Thracians make clothing of it very like linen cloth; nor could any person, without being very well acquainted with the substance, say whether this clothing is made of hemp or flax." From "cannabis," its name in Latin, have we taken our own word "canvas," to mean any texture woven of hempen thread.
Flax
now follows. Who that has ever seen growing a patch of beautiless, sad-looking hemp, and as he wandered a few steps further, came upon a field of flax all in flower, with its gracefully-drooped head, strewing the breeze, as it strayed over it, with its frail, light-blue petals, could at first have thought that both these plants were about to yield such kindred helps for man in his wide variety of wants? Yet so it is. Besides many other countries, all over this our native land flax is to be found growing wild. Though every summer its handsome bloom must have caught the eye of our Celtic British forefathers, they were not aware for ages of the use of this plant for clothing purposes, else had they left behind them some shred of linen in one or other of their many graves; since, following, as they did, the usage of being buried in the best of the garments they were accustomed to, or most loved when alive, their bodies would have been found arrayed in some small article of linen texture, had they ever worn
