THE ANCIENT USES OF FIBERS. 13 



or ancient Mexicans, were familiar with cotton, as well as several other 

 vegetable libers. With cotton and feathers we are told they produced 

 a soft and beautiful fabric, which was used for mantles and blankets, 

 and examples of their plain cotton fabrics are said to have been as fine 

 as some of the imported linens of the present age. Regarding the early 

 use of cotton on this continent, there are abundant records to show 

 that it has been cultivated more or less generally for four or five centu- 

 ries. How long it has been known to the early ancestors of some of the 

 native Indian tribes of our own country will never be known, although 

 from the fact that its use is required in religious ceremonials, as in the 

 Hopi Indian tribe, for example, we may be sure that such use is no 

 modern innovation. 



Among the ancient fibers of India, we have early allusions, in the 

 Institutes of Menu, to several prominent fibers, particularly where 

 the material of the sacrificial thread is prescribed. Cotton, sana, and 

 woolen thread are mentioned. Sana has been supposed to refer to Sunn 

 hemp, one of the commercial fibers of the present time (Crotalaria 

 juncea). Dr. Watt says the possible sana fibers of the Sanscrit authors 

 were Sunn, above mentioned, sanpat, or Hibiscus cannabinus, and com- 

 mon hemp (Cannabis sativa). On the whole, the evidence is in favor of 

 Sunn. Hemp grows wild throughout India, just as it is found in a wild 

 state in many parts of our own country, but is regarded as the source 

 of the drug known as bhang, or hasheesh, rather than as a fiber plant. 

 We know that the use of hemp among the ancients was very limited. It 

 has no mention in the Scriptures, and it is rarely referred to by the heath en 

 writers of antiquity. It was used by the Scythians at least five hundred 

 years before the Christian era, and some writers attribute to its cultiva- 

 tion an antiquity more remote by a thousand years; and it was known 

 to the Chinese at a period quite as remote. The Romans were familiar 

 with the use of hemp for sails and cordage, though not until after the 

 dawn of the Christian era. 



The China grass fiber, more popularly known as ramie, has been grown 

 in the Orient from time immemorial, and modern writers have attempted 

 to prove that it was contemporaneous with flax several thousand years 

 ago in Egypt, if, indeed, it was not used for mummy cloth. Dr. Watt 

 also advances a suggestion regarding ramie which would give it a great 

 antiquity in India. He states that frequent reference is made in the 

 Ramagana to a garment called the kshauma, and goes on to say that 

 while kshauma is generally regarded as a name for linen, the word 

 strongly resembles the Chinese name of the grass-cloth plant, or ramie, 

 which is Chu-ma, schou-ma, or, as now most commonly written, tcliou-ma. 

 The use of ramie fiber is undoubtedly old, but how ancient, history does 

 not inform us. 



The date palm, as we know, afforded a valuable material for cordage 

 in Egypt in very early times, as the modern excavations have revealed 

 to us, and the fiber is valued quite as highly by the present inhabitants 



