PURPLE DYEING, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 397 



rently sacrificed to the gods, to obtain tlieir favor or to avert their wrath. 

 Pliny is so much in k^ve with the purpU^ that he deems it no mere idle vanity, 

 but a laudable and natural yearning in men eagerly to desire it. 



To the great majority of Romans purple was forbidden for a long time by its 

 enormous cost as compared with the moderate fortunes of most of the plebeians ; 

 but when wealth flowed into Rome and corrupted the Romans, purple was fast 

 becoming the only wear, and the Cassars, from Julius downwards, prohibited 

 its use by private citizens under pain of death. The Byzantine emperors made 

 it penal even to write with purple ink; tlie use of which they monopolized for 

 their own imperial signatures; and the very art of dyeing in purple was con- 

 fined as a privilege and a monoply to favored individuals. As a natural con- 

 sequence, the art decayed, and at length was entirely lost towards the end 

 of the twelfth century, though so recently as the preceding century the Greeks, 

 Saracens, and Jews, had been renowned for their skill as dyers. During the 

 twelfth century the j)urple was less various in its shades, and very much less 

 in request. But though the fickle tyrant Fashion, for a time, discarded purple 

 in favor of scarlet, procured from the Thermes, the traditionary reverence for 

 the imperial purple was not extinct, for even to this day, throughout the Old 

 "World, "purple" is synonymous with imperial power and place. 



Strangely enough, while purple-dyeing Avas a disused, if not a forgotten, art 

 in many of the countries to which it had once procured so much profit, it still con- 

 tinued to be considerably practiced in Britain. With that island the ancient 

 Phoenicians are known to have had considerable commerce, the Britons, as we 

 learn from Herodotus, supplying the Phoenicians with tin, aud it is probable 

 that it was from the Phoenicians that the Britons learned the art of purple- 

 dyeing. The practice of the art existed in England till the close of the four- 

 teenth century ; and so late even as 1681 an Irishman is said to have made a 

 large fortune by the peculiar skill Avith which he gave the purple dye to fine 

 linen and other articles of female apparel. He, like the ancients, obtained his 

 dye from a shell-fish. 



The Chinese are said to have had a dye resembling the purple ; and in the 

 New World, according to Don Antonio d'Ulloe, the people of the provinces of 

 Guayaquil and Guatemala were, from the eailiest times, possessed of a beautiful 

 red color, which they obtained from certain sea snails of a size not greater than 

 a hazelnut. These, on account of their scarcity, Avere highly prized, and Avere 

 used only for dyeing choice and costly matters, such as beads, fringes, braidings, 

 &c. It was the popular belief that both the weight of the animal and the color 

 of its juices varied Avith the houi-s of the day. 



The purple dve had at length become so entirely forgotten that Avhat the 

 ancient Avriters had said of it was regarded as a fable, invented by the Phoeni- 

 cians to conceal their knowledge of the cochineal insect. A shell-fish yielding 

 such a fluid Avas no longer knoAvu. ItAvasnot until the seventeenth century 

 that the first attempt Avas made to redscover and to ultilize the long-forgotten 

 secret of antiquity. Then, indeed, men Avere enabled once more to vicAv the 

 prodigy with their own eyes, for in the West Indies, in Peru, on the coasts of 

 ItalyrFrance, and England, there Avere found muscles Avhosc vital juices, from ^ 

 being at first colorless, soon took, successively, the shades of yellow, green, blue, 

 and finally a splendid purple. William Cole, of Bristol, in England, was 

 the first who, in the seventeenth century, experimented for the revival of 

 the lost art of dyeing in purple, and he used only the common muscle Avhich is 

 so abundant on the shores of England, and after long trial at length discovered 

 the long-sou"-ht-for shell-fish in the Purpura Lapdlus. "If, "says he, "avc 

 carefully break the shell we find, near the head of this shell-fish, a white vein 

 lyiuo- in a furrow, and within that vein is a white, creamy, and somewhat gluti- 

 nous fluid, Avhich is the much-desired dyestufi"." His description precisely 

 coincides Avith that of Aristotle and of Pliny. 



