DYE-STUFFS. 237 



Man protects his feet from cold and other injuries with the 

 skins of beasts : in this he follows the example of his most 

 remote ancestors; but, unlike them, his taste is more 

 refined, and the multiplicity of his demands renders economy 

 necessary ; he therefore taxes the giant oak, the acacia, the 

 mangrove, and other vegetables, to furnish him a chemical 

 agent whereby the offensiveness of the skins he uses is 

 destroyed, and their tendency to decay arrested. He wears 

 his garments of hemp, flax, and cotton, and strives to rival 

 the flowers of the field by fixing their tints on his fabrics : in 

 this he fails, — these colours are as evanescent as the flowers 

 that yielded them. His thinking mind is taxed to remedy 

 the evil, and triumphant intellect leads him forth and 

 points out more suitable materials ; he collects them, and 

 adapts them to his purpose. 



Could an intelligent mind look with one eye upon any 

 of the glittering pageants of the fashionable world, and with 

 the other upon a store of dye-stuffs, what strange reflec- 

 tions would arise ! Could it be imagined that all those 

 brilliant colours were derived from such a source? — that 

 those warm and bright tints of red, crimson, and purple, 

 rivalling the rainbow, were derived from the ugly piles of 

 gnarled billets and blocks of Casalpinias, etc., cut with 



