time when Amasis lived, silk, in the shape of thread, had found, through traders' hands, its way to the markets of Egypt, and must have been thought a more fitting thing, from being a new as well as costly material, to grace a royal gift to a religious sanctuary of high repute, than the less precious and more common cotton. While this question was agitated, specimens of mummy-cloth were submitted to the judgment of several persons in the weaving trade deemed most competent to speak upon the matter. Helped only by the fingers' feel and the naked eye, some among them agreed that such textures were really woven of cotton. This opinion was but shortlived. Other individuals, more philosophical, went to work on a better path. In the first place, they clearly learned, through the microscope, the exact and never-varying physical structure of both these vegetable substances. That of cotton they found in its ultimate fibre to be a transparent tube without joints, flattened so that its inward surfaces are in contact along its axis, and also twisted spirally round its axis; that of flax, a transparent tube, jointed like a cane, and not flattened or twisted spirally.[1] Examined in the same way, several old samples of byssus or mummy-bandages from Egypt in every one instance were ascertained to be of fine unmixed flaxen linen. Ages before French Flanders had dreamed of weaving fine lawns, ages before one of her industrial cities—Cambray—had so far taken the lead as to be allowed to bestow her own name, in the shape of "cambric," on the finest kind that modern European ingenuity could produce, Egypt had known how to give to the world even a yet finer sort, and centuries after she had fallen away from her place among the kingdoms of the earth, her enthralled people still kept up their ancient superiority in spinning and weaving their fine, sometimes transparent, byssus, of which a specimen or two may be seen in this collection.[2]
For many reasons the history of
Silk
is not only curious, but highly interesting. In the early ages, its very existence was quite unknown, and when found out, the knowledge of it stole forth from the far east, and straggled westward very very slowly. For all that lengthened period during which their remarkable civilization lasted, the older Egyptians never once beheld silk: neither they, nor the Israelites, nor any other of the most ancient kingdoms of the earth, knew of it in any shape, either as a simple twist, or as a woven stuff. Not
