stitches; not, of course, with every modification
of a modification of a stitch which individual ingenuity may have
devised--it would need the space of an encyclopaedia to chronicle them
all--but with the broadly marked varieties of stitch which have been
employed to best purpose in ornament.

They are derived, naturally, from the stitches first used for quite
practical and prosaic purposes--buttonhole stitch, for example, to keep
the edges of the stuff from fraying; herring-bone, to strengthen and
disguise a seam; darning, to make good a worn surface; and so on.

The difficulty of discussing them is greatly increased by the haphazard
way in which they are commonly named. A stitch is called Greek, Spanish,
Mexican, or what not, according to the country whence came the work in
which some one first found it. Each names it after his or her individual
discovery, or calls it, perhaps, vaguely Oriental; and so we have any
number of names for the same stitch, names which to different people
stand often for quite different stitches.

When this confusion is complicated by the invention of a new name for
every conceivable combination of thread-strokes, or for each slightest
variation upon an old stitch, and even for a stitch worked from left to
right instead of from right to left, or for a stitch worked rather
longer than usual, the task of reducing them to order seems almost
hopeless.

Nor do the quasi-learned descriptions of old stitches help us much. One
reads about _opus_ this and _opus_ that, until one begins to wonder
where, amidst all this parade of science, art comes in. But you have not
far to go in the study of the authorities to discover that, though they
may concur in using certain high-sounding Latin terms, they are not of
the same mind as to their meaning. In one thing they all agree, foreign
writers as well as English, and that is, as to the difficulty of
identifying the stitch referred to by ancient writers, themselves
probably not acquainted with the _technique_ of stitching, and as likely
as not to call it by a wrong name. It is easier, for example, to talk of
_Opus Anglicanum_ than to say precisely what it was, further than that
it described work done in England; and for that we have the simple
word--English. There is nothing to show that mediaeval English work
contained stitches not used elsewhere. The stitches probably all come
from the East.

Nomenclature, then, is a snare. Why not drop titles, and cal