It was abundantly shown that the ancient Egyptians and the Hebrews made use of linen stuffs. Herodotus affirms this. Moreover, the plant may be seen figured in the ancient Egyptian drawings, and the microscope indubitably shows that the bandages which bind the mummies are of linen.[595] The culture of flax is of ancient date in Europe; it was known to the Kelts, and in India according to history. Lastly, the widely different common names indicate likewise an ancient cultivation or long use in different countries. The Keltic name _lin_, and Greco-Latin _linon_ or _linum_, has no analogy with the Hebrew _pischta_,[596] nor with the Sanskrit names _ooma_, _atasi_, _utasi_.[597] A few botanists mention the flax as “nearly wild” in the south-east of Russia, to the south of the Caucasus and to the east of Siberia, but it was not known to be truly wild. I then summed up the probabilities, saying, “The varying etymology of the names, the antiquity of cultivation in Egypt, in Europe, and in the north of India, the circumstance that in the latter district flax is cultivated for the yield of oil alone, lead me to believe that two or three species of different origin, confounded by most authors under the name of _Linum usitatissimum_, were formerly cultivated in different countries, without imitation or communication the one with the other.... I am very doubtful whether the species cultivated by the ancient Egyptians was the species indigenous in Russia and in Siberia.” My conjectures were confirmed ten years later by a very curious discovery made by Oswald Heer. The lake-dwellers of Eastern Switzerland, at a time when they only used stone implements, and did not know the use of hemp, cultivated and wove a flax which is not our common annual flax, but the perennial flax called _Linum angustifolium_, which is wild south of the Alps. This is shown by the examination of the capsules, seeds, and especially of the lower part of a plant carefully extracted from the sediment at Robenhausen.[598] The illustration published by Heer shows distinctly a root surmounted by from two to four stems after the manner of perennial plants. The stems had been cut, whereas our common flax is plucked up by the roots, another proof of the persistent nature of the plant. With the remains of the Robenhausen flax some grains of _Silene cretica_ were found, a species which is also foreign to Switzerland, and abundant in Italy in the fields of flax.[599] Hence Heer concluded that the Swiss lake-dwellers imported the seeds of the Italian flax. This was apparently the case, unless we suppose that the climate of Switzerland at that time differed from that of our own epoch, for the perennial flax would not at the present day survive the winters of Eastern Switzerland.[600] Heer’s opinion is supported by the surprising fact that flax has not been found among the remains of the lake-dwellings of Laybach and Mondsee of the Austrian States, where