tures with Hindostan. It is observed, at the same time, by intelli gent travellers, that this is the only art which the original inhabitants of that country have carried to any considerable degree of perfection. To the skill of the Hindoo in this branch of industry several causes contributed; his climate and soil conspired to furnish him with an abundance of the raw materials, and its manufacture is a sedentary employment, in harmony with the dislike of locomotion generated by the atmospheric temperature. It requires patience, of which he has an inexhaustible fund; it requires little bodily exertion, of which he is always exceedingly sparing; and the finer the tissue the more slender the force which he is called upon to apply; the weak and delicate frame of the Hindoo, moreover, is accompanied with an acuteness of external sense, particularly of touch, which is altogether unrivalled, and the flexibility of his fingers is equally remarkable; the hand of the Hindoo, therefore, constitutes an organ adapted to the finest operations of the loom, in a degree which is almost or altogether peculiar to himself." Elius Lampridius says (c. 26,), that the emperor Heliogabalus was the first Roman who wore cloth wholly of silk, the silk having been formerly combined with other less valuable materials. He mentions (c. 33.) among the innumerable extravagances of this emperor, that he had prepared a rope to hang himself with made of purple, silk, and scarlet. The following passage contains (Gregorius Nazianzenus, Cl. A. D. 370.) the earliest allusion to the use of silk in the services of the Christian Church. Silver and gold some bring to God, And make libations of their tears. -Ad Hellenium pro Monachis Carmen, tom. ii. p. 106: Ed. Par. 1630, Bishop Doane, of New Jersey, in a letter to a friend in this city, gives a most interesting account of the remarkable inscriptions found on some ancient monuments near Adon, on the coast of Hadramant, (Arabia,) and first deciphered by the Rev. C. Forster, of Great Britain. These records, it is said, restore to the world its earliest written language, and carry us back to the time of Jacob, and within 500 years of the flood. The inscriptions are in three parts. The longest is of ten lines, engraved on a smooth piece of rock forming one side of the terrace at Hisn Ghorab. Then there are three short lines, found on a small detached rock on the summit of the little hill. There are also two lines found near the inscriptions, lower down the terrace. They all relate to one transaction, an incident in Adite history. The tribe of Ad according to Mr. Sale, were descended from Ad the son of Aws or Uz, the son of Aram, the son of Shem, the son of Noah. The event recorded is the route and entire destruction of the sons of Ac, an Arab tribe, by the Aws or tribe of Ad, whom they invaded. In Mr. Forster's book fac similes are given of the inscription; the Aditie and the Hamyaritie alphabet; and a glossary containing every word in them, its derivation, and its explanation; with notes of copious illustration upon every point which they involve. The first inscription of ten lines is thus translated : We dwelt, living long luxuriously in the zananas of this spacious mansion; our condition exempt from misfortune and adversity. Rolled in through our channel. The sea, swelling against our castle with angry surge; our fountains flowed with murmuring fall, above The lofty palms; whose keepers planted dry dates in our valley date-grounds; they sowed the arid rice. We hunted the young mountain-goats and the young hares, with gins and snares; beguiling we drew forth the fishes. We walked with slow, proud gait, in needle-worked, many-coloured silk vestments, in whole silks, in grass-green chequered robes! Over us presided kings, far removed from baseness, and stern chastisers of reprobate and wicked men. They noted down for us according to the doctrine of Heber, Good judgments, written in books to be kept; and we proclaimed our belief in miracles, in the resurrection, in the return into the nostrils of the breath of life. Made an inroad robbers, and would do us violence; we rode forth, we and our generous youth, with stiff and sharp-pointed spears; rushing onward. Proud champions of our families and wives; fighting valiantly upon coursers with long necks, dun-coloured, iron gray, and bright bay. With our swords still wounding and piercing our adversaries, until charging home, we conquered and crushed this refuse of mankind. The short inscription in three lines reads thus: With hostile haste, the men of crime We assailed; onward rushed Our horses, and trampled them under foot. The two line inscription, which is under the long inscription, in the terrace, is as follows: Divided into parts, and inscribed from right to left, and marked with points, this song of triumph, Sarash Dzerahh. Transpierced, and hunted down, and covered their faces with blackness, Aws the Beni Ac. On the subject of these inscriptions, Mr. Forster, in his dedication of his book to the Archbishop of Canterbury, thus remarks: "What Job (who, living in the opposite quarter of Arabia, amid the sands of the great Northern desert, had no lasting material within reach on which to perpetuate his thoughts,) so earnestly desired, stands here realized." "Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! That (like the kindred creed of the lost tribe of Ad) they were graven with an iron pen, and lead, in the rock for ever. (For mine is a better and brighter revelation than theirs.) For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though, after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in the flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another." But it is not the antiquity of these monuments, however high, which constitutes their value; it is the precious central truths of revealed religion which they record and which they have handed down from the first ages of the post-diluvian world, that raise them above all price. Viewed in this respect, they strike at the very root of scepticism, and leave not even his own hollow ground beneath the feet of the unbeliever. For, if what the infidel vainly would bring into the question, as originating with Christianity, stands here registered as the primeval faith of mankind, there is an end at once, to the idle sophistry of unbelief." "The inscription on the rock of Hisn Ghorab, a contemporary witness of the faith of the most ancient of the old Arabians, changes the state of things, placing beyond the cavils of scepticism itself, at once, the fact and the purity of their belief in the scriptural doctrine of the resurrection; and presenting to the eye this great Gospel truth, (to borrow the language of Mr. Burke), covered with the awful hoar of innumerable ages. "It appears, says his Holiness Pope Alexander VI. that the world was first indebted to one Arkite Ghiden Ghelen, an extremely ingenious artizan of Nodville, for the first regularly manufactured piece of cloth ever produced on the surface of this terrestrial globe; and although it was akin to what we at this day and generation call matting, and produced by twisting and interlacing leaf stems and fibres together; yet the workmanship cannot be surpassed by the best manufacturers of Bolting Cloths of the present day." From this it would appear that his holiness had a sample of the cloth actually in his possession. Perhaps sewing the fig leaves as mentioned in the book of Genesis has reference to the same process. "An obvious improvement on the garment of leaves, proceeds his Holiness, which was suggested by twisting the peel of rushes into fine strings by which means superior textures were produced (See Fig. 13 ;) but this improvement was not adopted generally, in the part of the country of which we speak, till after the death of Methuselah. It did not escape the notice of the mat weavers, that their work was rendered more flexible and agreeable to the wearer (particularly for under garments,) by the use of a finer fibre, and accordingly we find that numerous trials were actually made, with the fibres of various kinds of plants, such as those of the hemp and flax species." It is curious how the descendants of our first parents obtained the knowledge of spinning flax into thread. We are credibly informed that it was by supernatural agency. We are indeed told by W. Cooke Taylor of Trinity College, Dublin, that a tradition exists in Ireland, which goes far to prove that spinning was first effectually practised in that country; but we disregard such testimony, as we have found the true and original story, from which the Irish one is evidently copied. This discovery we have made in the collection of Sir Henry Hunlock, and we think it right to give his version, which is as follows. "There were once an old woman and her daughter who lived at the side of a hill, (not under a hill, as the Hibernian would fain have it) in the midst of a forest, near Nodville. They were very poor, and their only support was obtained from selling the thread which the daughter spun with her spindle and distaff. During the long winter when the roads were so bad that merchants of the surrounding nations could not come to purchase the thread. The daughter, who was one of the most lovely creatures on earth, worked without cessation, in order that she might have enough of thread when the spring market came to enable her to purchase a cloak for her mother and a scarlet shawl for herself, in order that they might be properly attired while attending their devotions. (Where these shawls and cloaks were manufactured is a question for hierologists to solve.) "It so happened that the king of that country, whose name was Zannkul K. Euzen, had an only son, who while out one day deer hunting, went astray in the forest of Akiel, and called at the widow's cottage to enquire the way. He was greatly struck with the girl's beauty and not less with the numerous hanks of yarn which lay upon the floor of the cottage, and equally attested her skill and industry. He asked how it happened that she had collected such an immense pile, and the old woman, whose name was Zabozok, replied that her daughter had spun the whole in a week. "In a week!" exclaimed the astonished prince, "if this be true, I have found a 'gal' more worthy of my attachment than any other in the whole country. I will send you a load of flax, and if she has it done by the end of a week, I will, without any other proof of her merit, choose her as my bride; but if not, I will have you both cut in pieces and thrown to the cormorants and loons, for deceiving the son of your sovereign." "On the very next day a long train of camels, laden with flax, stood before the door of the cottage, and the drivers having unloaded them told the girl that she must spin this quantity in a week, or prepare for death. When they departed her poor heart was crushed with despair. She, however, was unwilling to reproach her mother, even by a look; but she went into the forest, and sitting down under a tree, began bitterly to bewail her sad fate. While she was thus weeping and lamenting, a decrepit old man came up and enquired the cause of her tears, and in reply she told him the whole story. "Do not weep, daughter," he said, “I will execute every one of the tasks imposed upon you by the prince, provided that you will either give me your eldest son, when he is twelve months and a day old, or that you shall in the intervening time find out my name." She agreed at once to the terms. The old man, by some mysterious agency, conveyed away the flax, and about an hour before the time appointed for the prince's arrival, (which was half past five o'clock in the morning) returned with the finest and best twisted thread that had ever been seen in Nodville. The prince, according to his promise, married the girl, and conveyed her with her mother to the palace, which stood upon a beautiful rising piece of ground about of a mile from the city, and overlooking it. (This palace must have been a very magnificent building, as it cost rather more than eleven and a quarter talents of gold.) "Every Monday morning before sunrise the prince gave out to his beloved the quantity of flax which he expected to be spun during the week, and every Saturday night the yarn was made ready for him by the mysterious old man. At length the princess became the mother of a beautiful boy, and the thoughts of the bargain she had made almost drove her to distraction. Every effort she made to discover the name of the wonderful spinner utterly failed, and he at every visit reminded her that the time was near when he would have the right to claim her child. "One evening as she sat oppressed with melancholy, her husband, who had just returned from hunting, enquired the cause of her sadness, but she was unable to answer him a word. "Come my love," |