Although from all antiquity upwards, till within some few years back, the unbroken belief had been that such mummy-clothing was undoubtedly made of linen woven out of pure unmixed flax, some writers led, or rather misled, by a few stray words in Herodotus (speaking of the corslet of Amasis, quoted just now) took that historian to mean wool, and argued that Egyptian textiles wrought a thousand years before were mixed with cotton. While the question was agitated, specimens of mummy-cloth were submitted to the judgment of several persons in the weaving trade deemed most competent to speak upon the matter. Helped only by the fingers’ feel and the naked eye, some among them agreed that such textures were really woven of cotton. This opinion was but shortlived. Other individuals, more philosophical, went to work on a better path. In the first place they clearly learned, through the microscope, the exact and never-varying physical structure of both these vegetable substances. They found cotton to be in its fibre a transparent tube without joints, flattened so that its inward surfaces are in contact along its axis and also twisted spirally round its axis; flax on the contrary is a transparent tube, jointed like a cane and not flattened or twisted spirally. Examined in the same way, old samples of byssus or mummy-bandages from Egypt in every instance were ascertained to be of fine unmixed flaxen linen. CHAPTER II. For many reasons the history of silk is not only curious but highly interesting. In the earliest ages even its existence was unknown, and when discovered the knowledge of it stole forth from the far east, and straggled westward very slowly. For all that lengthened period during which their remarkable civilization lasted, the older Egyptians probably never saw silk: neither they, nor the Israelites, nor any other of the most ancient kingdoms of the earth, knew of it in any shape, either as a simple twist or as a woven stuff. Not the smallest shred of silk has hitherto been found in the tombs or amid the ruins of the Pharaonic period. No where does Holy Writ, old or new, tell anything of silk but in one single place, the Apocalypse xviii. 12. It is true that in the English authorized version we read of “silk” as if spoken of by Ezekiel xvi. 10, 13; and again, in Proverbs xxxi. 22; yet there can be no doubt that in both these passages, the word silk is wrong through the translators misunderstanding the original Hebrew. The Hebrew word is not so rendered in any ancient version: and the best Hebraists have decided that silk was not known by the old Israelites. When St. John speaks of it he includes it with the gold, and silver, and precious stones, and pearls, and fine linen and purple which, with many other costly freights, merchants were wont to bring to Rome. It was long after the days of Ezekiel that silk in its raw form only, made up into hanks, first found its way to Egypt, western Asia, and eastern Europe.