The arts required for the making of the ark and the erection of the tabernacle were the preparing and dying of skins; the weaving of fine linen; the fine dyes, blue, scarlet, red, and purple; designing for the embroiderers[25], who wrought the pomegranates, the flowers, and the leaves; every variety of carving in wood; casting and chiselling of metals; and, finally, the engraving on precious stones, and setting them according to the jewellers’ art. When, to quiet the impatient Israelites, Aaron consented to make a god for them, such as they had been used to in Egypt, he caused them to bring their jewels of gold to him for the purpose; and, after he had cast or made a molten image, he finished it with the graver[26]. Now this is the process of casting figures in metal to this very day. Here, then, we have the Jews designing, making moulds, casting metals, and finishing with the graver. They were, therefore, not all mere brick-makers in Egypt; but some of them, like Moses and Aaron, had been instructed in the learning, or at least the arts, of the Egyptians. Again, for the brass and gold ornaments of the tabernacle and the ark, Bezaleel made the cherubim[27] on the mercy seat of beaten gold; that is, their faces and wings were embossed and chiselled. So likewise was the great candlestick, with its flowers and its almonds, its leaves and its buds. The whole putting together of the tent of the tabernacle is most ingenious, and denotes an acquaintance with great magnificence in architecture and in furniture. The breastplate was composed of twelve precious stones, from diamond the hardest, down to the most easily wrought, cornelian; yet each was engraved after the manner of a signet, with the name of one of the tribes, and set in its own peculiar setting. Such are the particulars we learn on undoubted authority of the arts at that early period, as practised in Egypt for convenience and ornament. But Egypt had another use for the arts. She applied them mainly to the service of religion. All nations, however rude, evince a desire to record their own actions and those of their fathers. Poets, bards, senachies, scalds, or by whatever name the same class of men may be called, are, like the traditionary tale-tellers of the American Indians, the earliest of historians. Their art, which is that of so placing words as to form sentences, whether distinguished by rhyme or by only a peculiar rhythm, more easily and pleasantly remembered than the same words would be in the ordinary arrangement of speech, may be practised by the warrior or the huntsman, without interfering with his other avocations. It is, therefore, peculiarly fitted for rude tribes, who cannot afford that any individual should give himself up exclusively to an inactive profession.