nd favoring the development of art
and design, and worthy of being emulated in the present day.

Speaking of the Persians, Professor Rawlinson says that the richer
classes seem to have followed the court in their practices. In their
costume they wore long purple or flowered robes, with loose-hanging
sleeves, flowered tunics reaching to the knee, also sleeved,
embroidered trowsers, tiaras, and shoes of a more elegant shape than
the ordinary Persian. Under their trowsers they wore drawers, and
under their tunics shirts, and under their shoes stockings or socks.
In their houses their couches were spread with gorgeous coverlets, and
their floors with rich carpets--habits that must have necessitated an
immense labor and skill, and indicate great knowledge in the
manufacture of textile fabrics.

Among the great historic nations of antiquity, the chief consumption
of copper and tin was in the manufacture of bronze; and the quantities
of these metals necessary for the purpose must have been very great,
for bronze seems to have been the principal metallic substance of
which articles both of utility and art were formed. Wilkinson, Layard,
and others, found bronze articles in abundance amongst the _debris_ of
all the ancient civilizations to which their researches extend,
proving that the manufacture of this alloy was widely known at a very
early period; and strange to say, when we consider the applications of
some of the tools found, we are forced to the conclusion that the
bronze of which they were made must originally have been in certain
important particulars superior to any which we can produce at the
present day. In these researches were found carpenters' and masons'
tools, such as saws, chisels, hammers, etc., and also knives, daggers,
swords, and other instruments which require both a fine hard edge and
elasticity. Were we to make such tools now, they would be useless for
the purpose to which the ancients applied them. Wilkinson says: "No
one who has tried to perforate or cut a block of Egyptian granite will
scruple to acknowledge that our best steel tools are turned in a very
short time, and require to be re-tempered; and the labor experienced
by the French engineers who removed the obelisk of Luxor from Thebes,
in cutting a space less than two feet deep along the face of its
partially decomposed pedestal, suffices to show that, even with our
excellent modern implements, we find considerable difficulty in doing
what to