A curious instance of the use of woollen stuff not woven but plaited, among the older stock of the Britons, was very lately brought to light while cutting through an early Celtic grave-hill or barrow in Yorkshire: the dead body had been wrapped, as was shown by the few unrotted shreds still cleaving to its bones, in a woollen shroud of coarse and loose fabric wrought by the plaiting process without a loom. As time passed by it brought the loom, fashioned after its simplest form, to the far west, and its use became general throughout the British islands. The art of dyeing soon followed; and so beautiful were the tints which our Britons knew how to give to their wools that strangers wondered at and were jealous of their splendour. A strict rule limited the colour of the official dress assigned to each of the three ranks into which the bardic order was distinguished to one simple unbroken shade: spotless white, symbolic of sunlight and holiness, for the druid or priest; sky-blue, emblem of peace, for the bard or poet; and green, the livery of the wood and field, for the teacher of the supposed qualities of herbs and leech-craft. Postulants, again, asking leave to be admitted into either rank were recognized by the robe barred with stripes of white, blue, and green, which they had to wear during the term of their initiation. With regard to the bulk of the people, we learn from Dion Cassius (born A. D. 155) that the garments worn by them were of a texture wrought in a square pattern of several colours; and, speaking of Boadicea, the same writer tells us that she usually had on, under her cloak, a motley tunic chequered all over with many colours. This garment we are fairly warranted in deeming to have been a native stuff, woven of worsted after a pattern in tints and design like one or other of the present Scotch plaids. Pliny, who seems to have gathered a great deal of his natural history from scraps of hearsay, most likely included these ancient sorts of British textiles with those from Gaul, when he tells us that to weave with a good number of threads, so as to work the cloths called polymita, was first taught in Alexandria; to divide by checks, in Gaul. The native botanical home of cotton is in the east. India almost everywhere throughout her wide-spread countries arrayed, as she still arrays, herself in cotton, gathered from a plant of the mallow family which has its wild growth there; and in the same vegetable produce the lower orders of people dwelling still further to the east also clothed themselves.