HISTORY. 29 



toral tribes. Where Abraham pitched his tent, with his 

 " sheep and oxen,'' and " asses and camels," where he sat 

 at the door of his tent, where the stone was rolled from the 

 wells from which his maidens drew water, there the Arab 

 or the wandering Turcoman encamps, and all the scene is 

 like a vivid panorama of the past. In the case of the present 

 people of the Desert, their tents, their journeyings, their 

 household cares, their flocks, their camels, their wells, all 

 inform us with what a matchless fidelity the Sacred History 

 has been told. 



Of the Sheep, we learn that its fleece was used by the 

 Shepherds of Syria for the purposes to which it is now ap- 

 plied, and that it was shorn from the skin, " Then Jacob 

 rose up and set his sons and his wives upon camels ; and he 

 carried away all his cattle, and all his goods which he had 

 gotten, the cattle of his getting which he had got in Padan- 

 aram, for to go to Isaac his father in the land of Canaan : 

 And Laban went to shear his sheep." * " And Judah was 

 comforted, and went up unto his sheep-shearers at Zim- 

 nath."t And at a long subsequent period, when the de- 

 scendants of Judah had become a nation, and acquired the 

 Land of Promise, the season of sheep- shearing is referred to 

 as one of rustic labour. Further the wool was woven into 

 cloth, which infers an advancement beyond the ruder stages 

 of the arts. The mere barbarian uses, for raiment, the skin 

 of the Sheep or Goat, with its covering of hair, as was prac- 

 tised by the Scythians, by the Gauls and Britons, and at the 

 present day by the Kalmuks and other nomadic people of 

 Asia, and by the Hottentots and other inhabitants of Southern 

 Africa. When cloth is made by barbarous tribes, it is simply 

 by pressing the wool together in a moist state, so as to form 

 felt, as we yet see done in the case of hats and beavers ; by 



* Genesis, xxxi. 17, 18, 19 : And it is worthy of note, that the undergoing 

 of a period of servitude to acquire a wife, recorded in the history to which 

 these passages refer, exists at the present day amongst a wild trihe in the heart 

 of India, which is designated by the term Laban-a. 



t Genesis, xxxviii. 12. 



