Stepping across the threshold of history, we learn that sixty-five centuries ago there lived in Egypt a king of the recently discovered first dynasty, who, as his name, Merneit-Ata, signifies, put his trust in the goddess Neith, the all-sustaining mother of the universe; and in his tomb to-day has been found a large upright slab, five feet high, whereon are carved the emblems of this goddess—two arrows crossed on an upright distaff. Here, in the dim morning of history, we find the distaff already honored as the sacred symbol of this feminine divinity, in whose eternal motherhood the Egyptians vaguely recognized that mysterious Power from which all things proceed. This was no prehistoric age of barbarism, for in the University Museum in London are now to be seen the relics of this long lost first dynasty, unearthed at Abydos within the last four years by Dr. Flinders Petrie—relics of a civilization already far advanced. We stand face to face with their weapons of war and of the chase, their household implements, their exquisitely carved ivories and gold jewelry and coin, their very clothing of fine linen, the work of the spinsters of those days, and the brain reels with the thought that even before them there were generations upon generations of human beings living in organized societies and practising the arts and engaged in the occupations of a high order of civilized life. The whole course of the first dynasty is now laid bare to us, and we find that its beginning in 4700 B.C. is modern history compared with the periods of development that must have gone before, for there is proof positive that even before this dynasty, ten other kings reigned in Egypt, and other hands grew flax on the banks of the Nile and spun and wove it into Egypt’s far-famed linen. In ancient Egypt linen occupied a most important place; it was worn by all classes, alive or dead, and it was the only material that the priestly orders were allowed to wear. We have all seen the beautiful mummy linen found wrapped around the mummies even of the most remote antiquity; and we know that only the best that Egypt could produce would be wound around the sacred bodies of their dead. This mummy-linen was not spun on a wheel, but on a hand-distaff, called sometimes a rock, such as the women of India use to this day in spinning the fine thread of India muslin, and such as was also used by the children of our American colonists while tending sheep and cattle in the field. The spinning-wheel as we know it is of much later date. It does not appear until the fifteenth century,—although the date of the first wool-wheel is placed by one authority in the fourteenth century,—before which time all spinning of wool, flax, and cotton was done on the primitive distaff tucked under the left arm in the way so familiar to us in pictures of peasant girls and Greek maidens spinning as they walk. Woman’s first distaff was the trunk of a tree;