ich we find remnants in
ruins and tombs--a lovely and pure red, with a tender bloom on it like
a fragment of the rainbow, and not the slightest shade of yellow.

One of the most beautiful specimens of this scarlet that I am
acquainted with, is a small drinking-cup (a "rhyton") at the British
Museum, in the form of a sphinx, with a white face, gilded hair, and a
little cap of pure cinnabar, which is so soft in tone that it suggests
the texture of scarlet velvet.

Cochineal, which was first brought from America in the sixteenth
century, has now replaced almost every other scarlet dye for textiles.

Crimson is once mentioned in Chronicles as karmel,[301] which may mean
the dye of the kermes insect;[302] and from this the word crimson is
legitimately derived. Whether the scarlet coupled with it is a
vegetable, mineral, or insect colour, we have no means of
ascertaining. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white
as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be as wool."[303]

From what Pliny says, it appears that some green dyes were produced
from a green clay; others from metals. Copper furnished the most
beautiful shades.

Blue has always been extracted from indigo. Pliny tells us that the
Phoenicians brought it from Barbarike, in the Indies, to Egypt; and
he quotes the "Periplus" on this subject. He gives an amusing report
that indigo is a froth collected round the stems of certain reeds; but
he was aware of its characteristic property, that of emitting a
beautiful purple vapour when submitted to great heat; and he says it
smells like the sea. The Egyptians likewise extracted blues from
copper.

Yellow was anciently, in Egypt, sometimes a vegetable and sometimes a
mineral dye. Browns and blacks were prepared from several substances,
especially pine wood and the contents of tombs burned into a kind of
charcoal.

We find that lime, chalk, white lead, and other mineral substances
were employed by the ancients for the different approaches to dazzling
whiteness. That of the lily, the emblem of purity, can only be
emulated in textile or pictorial art by opaque substances reduced as
much as possible by bleaching to the last expression of the colour of
the raw material. Nothing that is transparent can be really white, as
colours are seen through it, as well as the reflected lights on the
two surfaces.

In painting, we can produce the effect of whiteness in different ways,
leading by the gradation of