of Syria put the sign of the cross by the side of the “tree of life:” as we find upon the piece of silk, no. 7094. Another remarkable specimen of the Syrian loom is no. 7034, whereon the Nineveh lions come forth conspicuously. As good examples of well-wrought “diaspron” or diaper, no. 8233 and no. 7052 may be mentioned. Saracenic weaving, as shown by the design upon the web, is exemplified in several specimens at South Kensington. However much against what looks like a heedlessness of the teaching of the Koran, it is certain that the Saracens, those of the upper classes in particular, felt no difficulty in wearing robes upon which animals and the likenesses of created things were woven; with the strictest of their princes a double-headed eagle, possibly borrowed from the crusaders, was a royal heraldic device. Stuffs figured with birds and beasts, with trees and flowers, were not the less on that account of Saracenic workmanship, and meant for Moslem wear. What, however, may be chiefly looked for upon Saracenic textures is a pattern consisting of longitudinal stripes of blue, red, green, and other colour; some of them charged with animals, small in form; some written, in large Arabic letters, with a word or sentence. Moresco-Spanish or Saracenic textiles wrought in Spain, though partaking of the striped pattern and bearing words in real or imitated Arabic, had some distinctions of their own. The designs shown upon these stuffs are almost always drawn out of strap-work, reticulations, or some combination of geometrical lines, amid which are occasionally to be found different forms of conventional flowers. Sometimes, but very rarely, the crescent moon is figured as in the curious piece, no. 8639. The colours of these silks are usually either a fine crimson or a deep blue with almost always a fine toned yellow as a ground. But one remarkable feature in these Moresco-Spanish textiles is the presence of the ingenious imitation (before spoken of) of gold; for which shreds of gilded parchment cut up into narrow flat strips are substituted and woven with the silk. This, when fresh, must have looked very bright, and have given the web all the appearance of the favourite stuffs called here in England “tissues.” The fraud, as already explained, if fraud it were, is not easily discovered without a magnifying glass. A guide may be found in the blackness of the gold. Nos. 7095, 8590, and 8639, are examples of this gilded vellum. The Sicilian school strongly marked wide differences between itself and all the others which had lived before; and the history of its loom is as interesting as it is varied.