Woven fabrics include all those products of art in which the elements or parts employed in construction are more or less filamental, and are combined by methods conditioned chiefly by their flexibility. The processes employed are known by such terms as wattling, interlacing, plaiting, netting, weaving, sewing, and embroidering. MATERIALS AND PROCESSES. Viewing the entire textile field, we find that the range of products is extremely wide. On the one hand there is the rude interlacing of branches, vines, roots, and canes in constructing houses, weirs, cages, rafts, bridges, and the like, and on the other, the spinning of threads of almost microscopic fineness and the weaving of textures of marvelous delicacy and beauty. The more cultured peoples of Central America and South America had accomplished wonders in the use of the loom and the embroidery frame, but the work of the natives of the United States was on a decidedly lower plane. In basketry and certain classes of garment-making, the inhabitants of the Mississippi valley were well advanced at the period of European conquest, and there is ample evidence to show that the mound-building peoples were not behind historic tribes in this matter. In many sections of our country the art is still practiced, and with a technical perfection and an artistic refinement of high order, as the splendid collections in our museums amply show. The degree of success in the textile art is not necessarily a reliable index of the culture status of the peoples concerned, as progress in a particular art depends much upon the encouragement given to it by local features of environment. The tribe that had good clay used earthenware and neglected basketry, and the community well supplied with skins of animals did not need to undertake the difficult and laborious task of spinning fibers and weaving garments and bedding. Thus it appears that well-advanced peoples may have produced inferior textiles and that backward tribes may have excelled in the art. Caution is necessary in using the evidence furnished by the art to aid in determining relative degrees of culture. SOURCES OF INFORMATION. The failure of the textile art to secure a prominent place in the field of archeologic evidence is due to the susceptibility of the products to decay. Examples of archaic work survive to us only by virtue of exceptionally favorable circumstances; it rarely happened that mound fabrics were so conditioned, as the soil in which they were buried is generally porous and moist; they were in some cases preserved through contact with objects of copper, the oxides of that metal having a tendency to arrest decay. The custom of burial in caves and rock shelters has led to the preservation of numerous fabrics through the agency of certain salts with which the soil is charged. Preservation by charring is common, and it is held by some that carbonization without the agency of fire has in some cases taken place.