garlic, can be extracted. If this is spread upon cloth of any kind and
exposed to air and sunlight it turns first green, next blue and then
purple. If the cloth is washed with soap--that is, set by alkali--it
becomes a fast crimson, such as Catholic cardinals still wear as princes
of the church. The Phoenician merchants made fortunes out of their
monopoly, but after the fall of Tyre it became one of "the lost
arts"--and accordingly considered by those whose faces are set toward
the past as much more wonderful than any of the new arts. But in 1909
Friedlander put an end to the superstition by analyzing Tyrian purple
and finding that it was already known. It was the same as a dye that had
been prepared five years before by Sachs but had not come into
commercial use because of its inferiority to others in the market. It
required 12,000 of the mollusks to supply the little material needed for
analysis, but once the chemist had identified it he did not need to
bother the Murex further, for he could make it by the ton if he had
wanted to. The coloring principle turned out to be a di-brom indigo,
that is the same as the substance extracted from the Indian plant, but
with the addition of two atoms of bromine. Why a particular kind of a
shellfish should have got the habit of extracting this rare element from
sea water and stowing it away in this peculiar form is "one of those
things no fellow can find out." But according to the chemist the Murex
mollusk made a mistake in hitching the bromine to the wrong carbon
atoms. He finds as he would word it that the 6:6' di-brom indigo
secreted by the shellfish is not so good as the 5:5' di-brom indigo now
manufactured at a cheap rate and in unlimited quantity. But we must not
expect too much of a mollusk's mind. In their cheapness lies the offense
of the aniline dyes in the minds of some people. Our modern aristocrats
would delight to be entitled "porphyrogeniti" and to wear exclusive
gowns of "purple and scarlet from the isles of Elishah" as was done in
Ezekiel's time, but when any shopgirl or sailor can wear the royal color