these tissues, which are principally of India manufacture, bearing scarcely _any analogy_ to the products of the _modern loom_. Some are CASHMERE SHAWLS of those patterns, which the French call _broucha_ and _espouline_, and are made in the Indian fashion, but with this difference, that they are limited to _four_ colors, and demonstrate the greatest antiquity by the primitive simplicity of their colors and design. Others are CRAPES and GAUZES, against the luxury of whose transparent tissues, the fathers of the church at that time so perseveringly fulminated their censures. The rest consist of _muslins_ and _China-crape of exquisite beauty_. The components of the majority of these tissues are of goats’ or camels’ hair of exceeding delicacy and fineness. Like the manufactured stuffs of ancient Egypt, painted on the walls of its palaces and tombs, or substantially preserved amidst the envelopes of mummies, the designs are limited to four colors, which are in fact the _four sacred ones of China_, _India_, _Egypt_, and the _Hebrew Tabernacle_. Nevertheless, the Egyptian designs, _identical with those of India_, are many of them of exquisite beauty. The consummate skill of the silk and cotton manufacturers of ancient Egypt, 4000 years ago, _the beauty and richness of their fabrics_--the little alteration which has taken place in the economy or machinery of the factories, as well as in their product, has been recently demonstrated in the great work of Champollion. All the details of the silk and cotton factories of Egypt, under the Pharaohs of the 18th dynasty (which then monopolized the commerce of the world, and sent a colony of weavers, from the overburthened population of Lower Egypt, to found Athens, and the subsequent civilization of Europe), are laid open with vivid accuracy in that splendid work[126], and brought with all their startling analogies before the eye of the modern reader by drawings from the temples, palaces, and tombs which it contains. It proves, indeed, that there is ”_nothing new under the sun_.” [125] A shred of gold cloth is preserved in the Museum of Antiquities at Leyden, which is supposed to have been discovered in one of the ancient tombs at Tarquinia in Etruria. In this tissue the gold forms a compact covering over bright yellow silk. [126] See Plate II.