July 17, 1884] 



NA TURE 



tilljjit gives some sort of an approach to the pattern. 

 (There are important suggestions in the book as to the 

 employment of melon-forms.) Whoever has picked the 

 fruit from the tender twigs of the pomegranate-tree, which 

 are'close set with small altered leaves, will never dream 

 ot "attributing the derivation of the thorny leaves that 



appear in the pattern to pomegranate-leaves at any stage 

 of their development. 



It does not require much penetration to see that the 

 outline of the whole form corresponds to the spathe of the 

 Araceae, even although in later times the jagged contour 

 is all that has remained of it, and it appears to have been 

 provided'with ornamental forms quite independently of 





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the rest of the pattern. The inner thistle-form cannot be 

 derived from the common thistle, because the surrounding 

 leaves negative any such idea. The artichoke theory also 

 has not enough in its favour, although the artichoke, as 

 well as the thistle, was probably at a later time directly 

 pressed into service. Prof. Ascherson first called my 

 attention to the extremely anciently cultivated plant, the 



Safflor (Carthamus tine tortus, Fig. 1 5), a thistle plant whose 

 flowers were employed by the ancients as a dye. Some 

 drawings and dried specimens, as well as the literature of 

 the subject, first gave me a hope to find that this plant 

 was the archetype of this ornament, a hope that was 

 borne out by the study of the actual plant, although I was 

 unable to grow it to any great perfection. 



In the days of the Egyptian King Sargo (according to 

 Ascherson and Schweinfurth) this plant was already well 

 known as a plant of cultivation ; in a wild state it is not 

 known (De Candolle, " Originel des Plantes cultive'es "). 

 In Asia its cultivation stretches to Japan. Semper cites 

 a passage from an Indian drama to the effect that over 

 the doorway there was stretched an arch of ivory, and 

 about it were bannerets on which wild safran (Saflor) was 

 painted. 



The importance of the plant as a dye began steadily to 

 decrease, and it has now ceased to have any value as such 

 in the face of the introduction of newer colouring matters 

 (a question that was treated of in a paper read a short 

 time ago by Dr. Reimann before this Society). Perhaps 

 its only use nowadays is in the preparation of rouge 

 {rouge vegetate). 



But at a time when dyeing, spinning, and weaving 



were, if not in the one hand, yet at any rate intimately con- 

 nected with one another in the narrow circle of a home 

 industry, the appearance of this beautiful gold-yellow 

 plant, heaped up in large masses, would be very likely to 

 suggest its immortalisation in textile art, because the 

 drawing is very faithful to nature in regard to the thorny 

 involucre. Drawings from nature of the plant in the old 

 botanical works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 

 look very like ornamental patterns. Now after the general 

 form had been introduced, pomegranates or other fruits — 

 for instance, pine-apples — were introduced within the nest 

 of leaves. 



Into the detailed study of the intricacies of this subject 

 I cannot here enter ; the East-Asian influences are not 

 to be neglected, which had probably even in early times 

 an effect upon the form that was assumed, and have fused 

 the correct style of compound flowers for flat ornament 

 with the above-mentioned forms, so as to produce peculiar 



