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exactly alike, there may be a difference, in both brilliancy and durability, of from one to two hundred per cent. Another important question is this: How much mordant does the particular ultramarine require? Nor is this important only in those great factories where the mordants are a considerable item of expense, for the artist also should be aware that every addition of mordant diminishes the clearness of the color. The less mordant the finer color, and vice

versa.

It admits of no doubt that from remote antiquity the art of coloring of the raiment with which man invested himself had acquired a certain degree of proficiency. Pliny, though he gives no particulars of the processes, yet assures as that the ancients were well acquainted with the use of mordauts, by which fixity is given to colors which otherwise would gradually change by successive gradations, or disappear altogether from the dyed fabric. Of those mordants he mentions human urine, ammonia, and certain salts, including rock salt and soda, as serving to give at once brilliancy and fixity of color to spun and woven stuffs. And in another passage he intimates a still more advanced knowledge of the art of dyeing as practiced by the ancients. "In Egypt," he says, "cloths are dyed in a quite peculiar manner. The cloth is first thoroughly cleansed and then successively dipped into one or more solutions, and finally into the fluid color for which the previously used solution has so great an affinity that the cloth is dyed as permanently as instantaneously. What is most remarkable about this process is the fact, that though the dye-vat contains dye of only one color, the web of cloth is dyed of one, two, or several colors, according to the kind of solutions used for the preliminary washings or dippings. And further, not only is the cloth so permanently dyed that the color cannot be washed out, but the cloth itself is rendered stronger and more durable.”

This language of Pliny shows, that our knowledge of the uses and effects of various mordants to heighten and fix color, and rather to improve than to injure the fabric of the stuff to be dyed, though doubtless much indebted to modern chemistry, is, substantially, as old as chemistry itself. In the case of ancient Egypt, such a knowledge need scarcely excite our surprise, that antique and mysterious land having been the source of the chemical science of at least all the people of antiquity. As nature herself suggested colored ornamentation, and the fugitive qualities of the earlier dyestuffs forced chemistry into the discovery of mordants, so the lack of a cultivated taste made the glaring scarlet and tawdry yellow the favorites of the earlier ages; just as, in our day, the same lack or imperfection of taste is apt to recommend those vivid hues to the favor of the childish and the unrefined. Next to the Egyptians the people of ancient India evinced most skill in the art of coloring. Job speaks with great admiration of the brilliant colors of Indian cloths. There is at this day in the museum of the Industrial Society at Paris a large and valuable collection of Indian colored stuffs, together with the utensils by which they were prepared. These stuff's should be called painted rather than dyed; the absorbent and mordant fluids were first applied with a brush, and the desired colors then laid on; those portions which were to remain white were at the outset covered with wax, and the outlines of the pattern traced on the remainder. There is also at Paris a shawl, ten feet long and five feet wide, the handiwork of Indian princesses, and so elaborately as well as beautifully executed that it must have employed the skill and industry of more than one generation of the royal and dusky work women. But everything else in ancient dyeing was surpassed by the proverbially pre-eminent

TYRIAN PURPLE.

Inventions have their place in Mythology, and not improperly; for if chance plays no inconsiderable part in the inventions and discoveries of the present days, so, also, it did in the days of old. All have heard, or read, the story of the dog

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which occasioned the discovery of the beautiful Tyrian purple. As Hercules (so runs the fable) walked one day on the sea-shore with the fair object of his love, her pet dog, playing around them, seized an open sea-snail, and dyed his mouth of so beautiful a color that the lady uttered a wish to have a dress of that selfsame hue. Hercules, of course, succeeded in granting her desire. It is assumed that this discovery dates from the year 1500 B. C.

For nearly all that we know of purple dyeing we are indebted to Aristotle, Pliny, and Vitruvius. Pliny mentions two shell-fish that yield the "purple," the "buccinum," so called, on account of its resemblance to a trumpet, and the "purpura." The coloring substance was said to be contained in a transparent and branching vein at the back of the creature's neck, and while the animal was alive, the fluid had a mucous or creamy consistence. If the fish were small, they were pounded; but if large, containing so much as an ounce of the highly valued fluid, the vein was detached, its contents mixed with five or six times its weight of water, and to the mixture thus formed soda was added, in the proportion of twenty ounces to every hundred pounds. The whole was then put into lead or tin vessels and kept in a moderately warm place for five or six days, the scum being from time to time carefully removed. As soon as the fluid assumed the precise tone of color that was desired, the wool was dyed. The process was very simple. The wool, being thoroughly cleansed from grease and all other impurities, was plunged into the dye for some five or six hours, or even longer if the object was to double dye the material, (dibaphes,) in which case it was highly esteemed and proportionably high in price. Wool thus dyed commanded in the reign of the Emperor Augustus the enormous price of two hundred dollars per pound, nearly its weight in gold!

We learn from Vitruvius that various countries had their peculiar shades of purple. At the north, the shade approached to violet, while at the south it became the vivid red which we now term a bright scarlet. Pliny also distinguishes two different shades of purple-the tyrium or purpura, a dark crimson like that of coagulated blood; and the amethystinum, the light violet blue of the amethyst. Both authors agree in stating that an excellent purple was obtained from some plants; our own madder, it would seem, being among them. Madder (Rubia tinctorum) was undoubtedly known and cultivated in several ancient countries-Italy and Judea, for instance. Woad, too, (Isatis tinctosria,) was well known to the ancients, and served to give to the purple that fine violet tint which was so much prized.

The purple-yielding shell-fish were found on all the coasts of the Old World; and in Greece, Italy, Dalmatia, Istria, and Egypt, there were large dyeing houses. Of course they used up an immense number of these minute animals; but the supply was equal to the demand. For instance, Mount Testacco, near Tarentum, consisted almost entirely of the shells of the Murex brandaris, which we believe to be the shells from which the Roman dyers extracted their coloring matter. According to Tacitus, the Germans had a purple dye which was especially in request for linen. But above all the purple dyes of the ancients, that of Tyre and Sidon was admired, and it was a very important item in the commerce of the merchant princes of Tyre. No color has ever been so long valued and so profusely lauded as the purple. In the days of Moses it was the distinctive color of the great and the wealthy; Homer makes Æneas offer a superb purple robe to Bellerophen; Dives, in the New Testament, is "clothed in purple and fine linen;" and it was in a robe of purple that the stern Roman Imperator triumphantly returned to the seven-hilled city, after vanquishing and subjugating some far barbarian foe. Pliny speaks of "the Tyrian purple" as being a color so representative of dignity and majesty that Roman lictors made way for it with their fasces and their followers. Not only was it the distinctive mark for both young and old of high rank or great wealth, but was still further honored by being the indispensable color of the robes of those who reve

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wrath.

rently sacrificed to the gods, to obtain their favor or to avert their Pliny is so much in love with the purple that he deems it no mere idle vanity, but a laudable and natural yearning in men eagerly to desire it.

To the great majority of Romans purple was forbidden for a long time by its enormous cost as compared with the moderate fortunes of most of the plebeians; but when wealth flowed into Rome and corrupted the Romans, purple was fast becoming the only wear, and the Cæsars, from Julius downwards, prohibited its use by private citizens under pain of death. The Byzantine emperors made it penal even to write with purple ink, the use of which they monopolized for their own imperial signatures; and the very art of dyeing in purple was confined as a privilege and a monoply to favored individuals. As a natural consequence, the art decayed, and at length was entirely lost towards the end of the twelfth century, though so recently as the preceding century the Greeks, Saracens, and Jews, had been renowned for their skill as dyers. During the twelfth century the purple was less various in its shades, and very much less in request. But though the fickle tyrant Fashion, for a time, discarded purple in favor of scarlet, procured from the Thermes, the traditionary reverence for the imperial purple was not extinct, for even to this day, throughout the Old World, "purple" is synonymous with imperial power and place.

Strangely enough, while purple-dyeing was a disused, if not a forgotten, art in many of the countries to which it had once procured so much profit, it still continued to be considerably practiced in Britain. With that island the ancient Phoenicians are known to have had considerable commerce, the Britons, as we learn from Herodotus, supplying the Phoenicians with tin, and it is probable that it was from the Phoenicians that the Britons learned the art of purpledyeing. The practice of the art existed in England till the close of the fourteenth century; and so late even as 1684 an Irishman is said to have made a large fortune by the peculiar skill with which he gave the purple dye to fine linen and other articles of female apparel. He, like the ancients, obtained his dye from a shell-fish. ́

The Chinese are said to have had a dye resembling the purple; and in the New World, according to Don Antonio d'Ulloe, the people of the provinces of Guayaquil and Guatemala were, from the earliest times, possessed of a beautiful red color, which they obtained from certain sea-snails of a size not greater than a hazelnut. These, on account of their scarcity, were highly prized, and were used only for dyeing choice and costly matters, such as beads, fringes, braidings, &c. It was the popular belief that both the weight of the animal and the color of its juices varied with the hours of the day.

The purple dye had at length become so entirely forgotten that what the ancient writers had said of it was regarded as a fable, invented by the Phoenicians to conceal their knowledge of the cochincal insect. A shell-fish yielding such a fluid was no longer known. It was not until the seventeenth century that the first attempt was made to red'scover and to ultilize the long-forgotten secret of antiquity. Then, indeed, men were enabled once more to view the prodigy with their own eyes, for in the West Indies, in Peru, on the coasts of Italy, France, and England, there were found muscles whose vital juices, from being at first colorless, soon took, successively, the shades of yellow, green, blue, and finally a splendid purple. William Cole, of Bristol, in England, was the first who, in the seventeenth century, experimented for the revival of the lost art of dyeing in purple, and he used only the common muscle which is so abundant on the shores of England, and after long trial at length discovered the long-sought-for shell-fish in the Purpura Lapillus. "If, "says he, "we carefully break the shell we find, near the head of this shell-fish, a white vein lying in a furrow, and within that vein is a white, creamy, and somewhat glutinous fluid, which is the much-desired dyestuff." His description precisely coincides with that of Aristotle and of Pliny.

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In 1709 Jussien made similar researches on the French coast-researches which, in the following year, were continued by Reaumur, who delighted to make theory and speculation the obedient handmaidens of every day utility. Somewhat later the soft-shelled molluscs of the Mediterranean shores were carefully examined by Italian naturalists, and so well has their pains-taking example been followed up that we are now acquainted with a goodly number of molluses that yield the purple dyestuff. For the most part they belong to the families of the Murex and the Buccinum, of Linnæus; and it is thought that the Murex trunculus, of Linnæus, (one of the most abounding of the Mediterranean seasnails,) and the Purpura and Purpura putula, of Lamarck, are identical with Pliny's Buccinum. The Purpura Lapillus is quite common on the European shores, and is believed to have been the most important among the purple seasnails of antiquity. Lesson thinks that the Janthina fragilis is the true buccinum of antiquity. It is a native of the Mediterranean. In stormy weather it is thrown upon the coast of the French department of Ande in such vast numbers as actually to cover the strand. Lesson attributes to Narbonne (the Narbo Martins of the ancients) great skill and celebrity in the art of purple dyeing in the times of ancient Rome. Other writers say that though the Garlish purple was very splendid, it yet was very evanescent. The janthina undoubtedly affords a bright and beautiful purple, and when taken out of the water yields the fluid to the average amount of about an ounce. But the fluid is furnished by a gland entirely different from that spoken of by the old writers, a fact which it is difficult to reconcile with the ancient statement. Moreover, the modern purple is very evanescent, while the ancient was valued no less for its durability than for its beauty. Thus, in Plutarch's Life of Alexander the Great, we read that the Greeks found in the treasury of Darius purple stuffs to the value of five thousand talents, and that, though some of them were nearly two centuries old, the color had not at all faded. Lesson says that the coloring fluid yielded by the janthina passes through the same changes of light and shade as the vegetable colors do. With alkalies, it becomes blue; with acids, red.

Some writers include Aplysia depulans and Scalaria clathrus among the purple sea-snails, but this is doubtful. It is true that the aplysia sometimes voluntarily, always when alarmed, does emit a beautiful purple fluid, and, in the latter case, in such quantities as to color the water for several yards around. Probably the purple fluid, in the case of the shell-fish, is analogous to the ink of the cuttlefish, the concealing and protecting provision of the otherwise defenceless creature. The fluid is colored at the moment of its ejection, but the tint is of slight duration. The fluid of the Scalaria clathrus is still more evanescent-time and exposure to light discharging it entirely. Of the Planorbis corneus Wallis says: "If you put salt, ginger, or pepper into its mouth it yields a purple fluid, but the color is so evanescent that we know of no mordant that can fix it."

At present we are acquainted with a great number of purple-yielding shellfish, but we cannot identify any of them with the purple sea-snails of the ancients, the descriptions left us by the old writers being too general and vague. In our own time Bancroft has industriously experimented with the dyeing fluid of purple sea-snails, and he asserts that they yield a fluid which surpasses everything else in animal nature, alike for the brilliancy and the permanency of its purple, and for the facility and simplicity of its use. when separated from it, the fluid has a creamy appearance, or, as Reaumur phrases it, resembles a well-developed pus. The textures to which it is applied become first of a light, then of a darker green, next blue, and acquire finally a rich deep purple tint, inclining to crimson. According to Bancroft, the gradual prismatic changes of the colors are as beautiful as they are remarkable.

Within the fish, or

the most powerful chemical agencies, whether mineral acids or the most e alkali, can only subject this purple to one change-wash the fabric in