When pope Paschal, A. D. 821, sought for the body of St. Cecily who was martyred in the year 230, the pontiff found the body in the catacombs, whole and dressed in a garment wrought all of gold, with some of her raiment drenched in blood lying at her feet. In making the foundations for the new St. Peter’s at Rome the workmen came upon and looked into the marble sarcophagus in which had been buried Probus Anicius, prefect of the Pretorian, and his wife Proba Faltonia, each of whose bodies was wrapped in a winding-sheet woven of pure gold strips. The wife of the emperor Honorius died sometime about the year 400, and when her grave was opened, in 1544, the golden tissues in which her body had been shrouded were taken out and melted, amounting in weight to thirty-six pounds. The late father Marchi also found among the remains of St. Hyacinthus several fragments of the same kind of golden web. Childeric, the second king of the Merovingean dynasty, was buried A. D. 482, at Tournai. In the year 1653 his grave was discovered, and amid the earth about it so many remains of pure gold strips were turned up that there is every ground for thinking that the Frankish king was wrapped in a mantle of golden stuff for his burial. We have reason to conclude that the strips of pure gold out of which the burial cloak of Childeric was woven were not round but flat, from the fact that in a Merovingean burial ground at Envermeu the distinguished archæologist Cochet a few years ago came upon the grave once filled by a lady whose head had been wreathed with a fillet of pure golden web, the tissue of which is thus described: “Ces fils aussi brillants et aussi frais que s’ils sortaient de la main de l’ouvrier, n’étaient ni étirés ni cordés. Ils étaient plats et se composaient tout simplement de petites lanières d’or d’un millimètre de largeur, coupée à même une feuille d’or épaisse de moins d’un dixième de millimètre. La longeur totale de quelques-uns atteignait parfois jusqu’à quinze ou dix-huit centimètres.” Our own country can furnish an example of this kind of golden textile. On Chessel down, in the isle of Wight, when Mr. Hillier was making some researches in an old Anglo-saxon place of burial, the diggers found pieces of gold strips, thin and quite flat, which are figured in M. l’abbé Cochet’s learned book just mentioned. Of the same rich texture must have been the vestment given to St. Peter’s at Rome in the middle of the ninth century, and described in the Liber Pontificalis as made of the purest gold, and covered with precious stones: “Carolus rex sancto Apostolo obtulit ex purissimo auro et gemmis constructam vestem, etc.”