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
cultivées"). 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 15]

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 coloring 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 végétale_).

But at a time when dyeing, spinning, and weaving were, if not in the one
hand, yet at any rate intimately connected 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
immortalization 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