There has been so much said and written about the beauty and value of the old-fashioned dyestuffs and dyeing processes and their superiority to the modern coloring matters, that many well-meaning people of artistic tastes have never ceased to deplore the discovery and introduction of the so-called aniline or coal-tar dyes, and to regard them as a serious detriment to the art of dyeing. Some, indeed, have gone so far as to decry the discoveries not only of the last fifty years, but also of the last nineteen or twenty centuries. These quote with approval the great John Ruskin, founder and original leader of the whole Arts and Crafts movement in England, if not in the world, as having said, “There has been nothing discovered of the slightest interest in the tinctorial art” (the art of dyeing) “since the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans.” To suppose for an instant that this important and highly specialized art has not advanced during nearly two thousand years is, on the face of it, absurd. A very little knowledge of dyestuffs forces recognition of the fact that many of the very best, fastest, and most beautiful of the dyes of our ancestors—such as cochineal, with which they dyed practically all of their fast pinks and scarlets; logwood, with which silk as well as wool was, and is still dyed black; fustic, which was used for fast yellows on wool and cotton, and several others—were natives of America, and therefore only known to the world at large since the seventeenth century. Indeed, as we shall see, the art of dyeing, based as it is on chemical processes, discovered one by one, but never properly explained or understood until the last sixty or seventy years, is, perhaps, the one art above all others in which not only the ancient world, but the world of comparatively a few years ago, was very distinctly inferior to that of the present day. In drawing, sculpture, painting, architecture, ceramics, wood-carving, lacemaking, metal working, and almost every other art that can be mentioned, the craftsman of the Middle Ages, if not indeed of ancient Rome or Greece, could still hold his place against modern competitors. Even in such a modern art as book printing, the lover of books will claim, with considerable reason, that no more beautiful or more nearly perfect specimen of the printer’s art has ever been produced than the Gutenberg Bible, the first product of the European printing press. The art of dyeing, however, has been changing and developing so much from century to century, that, even before the wonderful discoveries of the last fifty years, the effects produced by any one generation of dyers would have been totally impossible for their ancestors of a few generations before them.