The purple of Tyre was known at an epoch exceedingly remote, and the dyers of Phœnicia surpassed in skill those of all the other nations of the east. This people came a thousand years ago as far as Great Britain to procure an enormous quantity of tin, a metal which has the property, or rather certain salts of it have, of augmenting the intensity of the principal red colors contained in many vegetable and animal substances. Upon this subject, we would advise you to run over, in the third book of Strabo, the interesting recital which he gives of the pursuit of a Phœnician vessel by a Roman bark, which wished to seize the tin with which it was freighted. It was in the neighborhood of the coast of Cornwall: the Phœnician, seeing the prow of the Roman near his stern, threw three-fourths of his cargo overboard, and steered right upon a sand-bank, where the enemy, as you may well suppose, did not think of following him. The Tyrians, astonished at the great opulence which their city attained, attributed to the gods the magic art of dyeing in purple. All writers, and especially Ctesias, physician to a king of Persia, who lived four hundred years before the Christian era, and Ælian, a contemporary of Alexander Severus, frequently allude to an insect, to which the Phœnicians were indebted for the superior manner in which they could produce an admirable scarlet. It was evidently the cochineal: and this little animal must have been at that time less rare than at present in Syria, India, and Persia, since the humblest classes frequently wore stuffs dyed with purple. It is not surprising that they knew not how to extract from the cochineal the most brilliant of all the known reds, the carmine, before which the vermillion grows pale, and which chemistry can procure for us, in our days, in great abundance; and you know that this little insect lives upon the _cactus_ which grow in Brazil, in Mexico, at Jamaica, and at Saint Domingo.