It does not require much penetration to see that the outline of the whole form corresponds to the spathe of the Araceæ, even although in later times the jagged contour is all that has remained of it, and it appears to have been provided with ornamental forms quite independently of the rest of the pattern. The inner thistle-form cannot be derived from the common thistle, because the surrounding leaves negative any such idea. The artichoke theory also has not enough in its favor, although the artichoke, as well as the thistle, was probably at a later time directly pressed into service. Prof. Ascherson first called my attention to the extremely anciently cultivated plant, the safflor (_Carthamus tinctoris_, Fig. 15), a thistle plant whose flowers were employed by the ancients as a dye. Some drawings and dried specimens, as well as the literature of the subject, first gave me a hope to find that this plant was the archetype of this ornament, a hope that was borne out by the study of the actual plant, although I was unable to grow it to any great perfection. In the days of the Egyptian King Sargo (according to Ascherson and Schweinfurth) this plant was already well known as a plant of cultivation; in a wild state it is not known (De Candolle, "Originel des Plantes cultivées"). In Asia its cultivation stretches to Japan. Semper cites a passage from an Indian drama to the effect that over the doorway there was stretched an arch of ivory, and about it were bannerets on which wild safran (_Saflor_) was painted. [Illustration: FIG. 15] The importance of the plant as a dye began steadily to decrease, and it has now ceased to have any value as such in the face of the introduction of newer coloring matters (a question that was treated of in a paper read a short time ago by Dr. Reimann before this Society). Perhaps its only use nowadays is in the preparation of rouge (_rouge végétale_). But at a time when dyeing, spinning, and weaving were, if not in the one hand, yet at any rate intimately connected with one another in the narrow circle of a home industry, the appearance of this beautiful gold-yellow plant, heaped up in large masses, would be very likely to suggest its immortalization in textile art, because the drawing is very faithful to nature in regard to the thorny involucre. Drawings from nature of the plant in the old botanical works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries look very like ornamental patterns. Now after the general form had been introduced, pomegranates or other fruits--for instance, pine-apples--were introduced within the nest of leaves. [Illustration: FIG. 16.]