t in the art of embroidery it opens
out such endless avenues, through such vast regions of technical
study, that we must acknowledge the difficulty, or rather the
impossibility, of including in one volume even a tithe of the
information already collected.

I shall, therefore, only dedicate a few pages to the history of those
fibres which have always been most important in the different phases
of our civilization.

Among books on textile materials, I must again name the "Textrinum
Antiquorum," by Yates. His premature death, and the loss that the
world of art and manufacture has sustained by the chain of his
invaluable researches being broken, cannot be appreciated but through
the study of the first and only volume of this already rare book, from
which I venture to quote largely.

Semper's "Der Stil" is a work of reference on this subject, so
valuable that it should, by a good translation, be placed within the
reach of non-German scholars.

From Colonel Yule's "Marco Polo," and his abundant notes, we learn
much of Asiatic textile art in the thirteenth century, and its early
traditions in the immutable East, and Sir G. Birdwood's books on this
Indian art are most instructive.

Egyptian textiles are splendidly illustrated by Sir Gardiner
Wilkinson. All these modern writers quote Pliny and the Periplus;[130]
and Pliny quotes all the classic authors, from Homer to his day. Here
is a wide field for gathering information regarding the materials for
embroidery in past ages.

When we use the phrase "raw material" so glibly, with an aesthetic
contempt for that which the art of man has neither manipulated nor
reorganized, we show our own coarse appreciation, if not ignorance, of
the wonderful inherent beauty and microscopic delicacy of form,
colour, and substance of those materials which we fashion for our own
uses.

Few know the structure of the tender filaments of wool, flax, cotton,
and silk; or that each has its peculiar form and attributes, and its
individual capabilities for the purposes for which they appear to us
to have been created, i.e. the clothing and adornment of man's dress
and his home.

I should like to draw attention to these well-attested facts.

Seen through a microscope, the forms of these raw materials differ
greatly.

Flax is difficult to describe, as it varies according to the soil and
climate it comes from. Its fibre, however, has always a shiny outer
surface, and is transparent, cylindrical,