The ample domains of Learning are fast being submitted to fresh irrigation and renewed culture,--the exclusiveness of the cloister has given place to an unrestricted distribution of the intellectual wealth of all times. What civilization has accomplished in the physical is also being achieved in the mental world. The sterile and inaccessible wilderness is transformed into the well-tilled garden, abounding in luxurious fruits and fragrant flowers. It is the golden age of knowledge--its Paradise Regained. The ponderous works of the olden time have been displaced by the condensing process of modern literature; yielding us their spirit and essence, without the heavy, obscuring folds of their former verbal drapery. We want real and substantial knowledge; but we are a labor-saving and a time-economizing people,--it must therefore be obtained by the most compendious processes. Except those with whom learning is the business of life, we are too generally ignorant of the mighty mysteries which Nature has heaped around our path; ignorant, too, of many of the discoveries of science and philosophy, in ancient as well as modern times. To meet the exigencies of our day, a judgment in the selection and condensation of works designed for popular use is demanded--a facility like that of the alchymist, extracting from the crude ores of antiquity the fine gold of true knowledge. The plan of this work naturally divides itself into four departments. The first division is devoted to the consideration of _Silk_, its early history and cultivation in China and various other parts of the world; illustrated by copious citations from ancient writers: From among whom to instance Homer, we learn that embroidery and tapestry were prominent arts with the Thebans, that poet deriving many of his pictures of domestic life from the paintings which have been found to ornament their palaces. Thus it is evident that some of the proudest attainments of art in our own day date their origin from a period coeval at least with the Iliad. Again we find that the use of the distaff and spindle, referred to in the Sacred Scriptures, was almost as well understood in Egypt as it now is in India; while the factory system, so far from being a modern invention, was in full operation, and conducted under patrician influence, some three thousand years ago. The Arabians also, even so far back as five centuries subsequent to the deluge, were, it is stated on credible authority, skilled in fabricating silken textures; while, at a period scarcely less remote, we possess irrefragable testimony in favor of their knowledge of paper made from cotton rags. The inhabitants of Phœnicia and Tyre were, it appears, the first acquainted with the process of dyeing: the Tyrian purple, so often noticed by writers, being of so gorgeous a hue as to baffle description. The Persians were also prodigal in their indulgence in vestments of gold, embroidery and silk: the memorable army of Darius