now follows. Who that has ever seen growing a patch of beautiless, sad-looking hemp, and as he wandered a few steps further, came upon a field of flax all in flower, with its gracefully-drooped head, strewing the breeze, as it strayed over it, with its frail, light-blue petals, could at first have thought that both these plants were about to yield such kindred helps for man in his wide variety of wants? Yet so it is. Besides many other countries, all over this our native land flax is to be found growing wild. Though every summer its handsome bloom must have caught the eye of our Celtic British forefathers, they were not aware for ages of the use of this plant for clothing purposes, else had they left behind them some shred of linen in one or other of their many graves; since, following, as they did, the usage of being buried in the best of the garments they were accustomed to, or most loved when alive, their bodies would have been found arrayed in some small article of linen texture, had they ever worn such. That at length they became acquainted with its usefulness, and learned to prepare and spin it, is certain; and in all likelihood the very name “lin-white thread,” which those Celts gave it in its wrought shape, furnished the Greeks with their word λίνον, and the Latins their _linum_, for linen. The term “flax,” which we still keep, from the Anglo-Saxon tongue, for the plant itself and its raw material, and the Celtic “linen,” for the same vegetable produce when spun and woven into cloth, are words for things akin in our present language, which, as in many such like instances, show the footprints of those races that, one after another, have trod this land. * * * * *