The women commonly wore white dresses; besides, the ancients had early made rapid progress in the art of bleaching. They were all ignorant, as you may well suppose, of the expeditious process which the illustrious Berthollet has conceived, with the assistance of a hydrochlorate of lime or of soda; they knew, however, how to use other detersive substances to impart a shining whiteness to their stuffs. “There exists among us,” says Pliny, “a species of poppy, very rare, which bleaches linen cloth wonderfully; and yet, would one believe it? we have among us a crowd of people so vain that they have attempted to dye their linen as well as their wool.” In alluding in another passage to the sky-blue curtains of the Emperor Nero, he begs us not to forget that, despite of all the rich shades produced by dyeing, _white_ cloth never ceased to enjoy the highest reputation, to such a degree that they conferred the title of _Great_ on a person named _Lentulus Spinter_, who first conceived the idea of hanging white curtains around the places consecrated to the Olympic games. This same kind of stuff was spread upon all the houses of the _Via Sacra_, by order of Cæsar, the Dictator, who planning magnificent decorations, wished that they should extend from his residence up to the Capitol. The basis of the hard soap of our days was undoubtedly known to the ancients. The _natron_ or sub-carbonate of soda, which they collect in the channels of the Nile at the present time, was really gathered there in sufficient abundance in the first ages of the world. From another place, the man of Uz made use of it; for he makes ready in one of his chapters (Job, ch. 9.) to wash his clothes in a pit with _bor_ or _borith_, a plant much esteemed on account of its alkaline properties. (You must not confound this with the _boron_ of modern chemistry, which with oxygen constitutes the boracic acid.) Open the Sixth Book of the Odyssey; Homer will there shew you Nausicaa, and her companions, trampling their clothes with their feet to whiten them for an approaching marriage; the bard adds that the ladies knew perfectly well the property which the atmosphere possessed of assisting in the destruction of the only substance which imparts a greyish appearance to cloths. In alluding to this passage, Goguet affirms that all the linen and cotton garments were washed daily. An anecdote related by Apuleius in his book of “The Golden Ass,” goes to prove still more the attention which they formerly paid to the art of bleaching; “A wag,” said he to us, “being secretly introduced into the house of a merchant, came near being suffocated by the sulphurous gas which was given out by a bleaching machine in which he was hid.”