The first to teach the natives of Sicily how to rear the silkworm and spin its silk were, as it would seem, the Mahomedans, who coming over from Africa brought with them, besides the art of weaving silken textiles, a knowledge of the fauna of that vast continent--its giraffes, its antelopes, its gazelles, its lions, its elephants. These invaders told them also of the parrots of India and the hunting sort of leopard,--the cheetahs; and when the stuff was wrought for European wear both beast and bird were imaged upon the web, and at the same time a word in Arabic was woven in. Like all other Saracens, those in Sicily loved to mingle gold in their tissues; and, to spare the silk, cotton thread was not unfrequently worked up in the warp. When, therefore, we meet with beasts taken from the fauna of Africa, such, especially, as the giraffe and the several classes of the antelope family, with perhaps also an Arabic motto, and part of the pattern wrought in gold, as well as cotton in the warp, we may fairly take the specimen as a piece of Sicily’s work in its first period of weaving silk. The second epoch was when in the twelfth century Roger, king of Sicily, took Corinth, Thebes, and Athens; from each of which cities he led away captives all the men and women he could find who knew how to weave silks, and carried them to Palermo. These Grecian new comers brought fresh designs which were adopted sometimes wholly, at others but in part and mixed up with the older Saracenic style. In this second period of the island’s loom we discover what traces the Byzantine school impressed upon Sicilian silks, and helped so much to alter the type of their first designs. On one silk, the pattern is a grotesque mask amid the graceful twinings of luxuriant foliage, such as might have been then found upon many a fragment of old Greek sculpture; this may be seen on no. 8241; on another, a sovereign on horseback wearing the royal crown and carrying a hawk upon his wrist, as in no. 8589; on a third, no. 8234, is the Greek cross, with a pattern much like the old netted or “de fundato” kind which has been described, p. 38. But Sicily’s third is quite her own peculiar style. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century she struck into an untried path. Without throwing aside the old elements employed by the Mahomedans Sicily put with them the emblem of Christianity, the cross, in various forms, on some occasions with the letter V. four times repeated.