The wealth and power of Great Britain are supposed to rest upon her mines of iron and coal.  These undoubtedly help to sustain the fabric.  With her iron and coal, she fashions and propels the winged Mercuries of her commerce; with these and the clay that underlies her soil, she erects her factories and workshops; these form the Briarean arms by which she fabricates her tissues.  But it is by more minute columns than these, it is by the hollow tubes revealed by the microscope, the fibres of silk, wool, and flax, hemp, jute, and cotton, that she sustains the great structure of her wealth.  These she spins, weaves, and prints into draperies which exact a tribute from the world.  During the year 1860 Great Britain imported or produced a million tons of such fibres, an amount equal to five million bales of cotton, more than one-half of which were in cotton alone.  These fibres it is our purpose to examine.

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The thread of the silk-worm came early into use.  The Chinese ascribe its introduction to the wife of one of their emperors, to whom divine honors were subsequently paid.  Until the Christian era silk was little known in Europe or Western Asia.  It is mentioned but three times in the common version of the Old Testament, and in each case the accuracy of the translation is questioned by German critics.  It is, however, distinctly alluded to by St. John, by Aristotle, and by the poets who flourished at the court of Augustus, Virgil, Horace, and Tibullus, and is referred to by the writers of the first four centuries.  Tertullian, in his homily on Female Attire, tells the ladies,—­“Clothe yourselves with the silk of truth, with the fine linen of sanctity, and the purple of modesty.”  The golden-mouthed St. Chrisostom writes in his Homilies,—­“Does the rich man wear silken shawls?  His soul is in tatters.”  “Silken shawls are beautiful, but they are the production of worms.”

The silken thread was early introduced.  Galen recommends it for tying blood-vessels in surgical operations, and remarks that the rich ladies in the cities of the Roman Empire generally possessed such thread; he alludes also to shawls interwoven with gold, the material of which is brought from a distance, and is called Sericum, or silk.  Down to the time of the Emperor Aurelian silk was of great value, and used only by the rich.  His biographer informs us that Aurelian neither had himself in his wardrobe a garment composed wholly of silk, nor presented any to others, and when his own wife begged him to allow her a single shawl of purple silk, he replied,—­“Far be it from me to permit thread to be balanced with its weight in gold!”—­for a pound of gold was then the price of a pound of silk.

Silk is mentioned in some very ancient Arabic inscriptions; but down to the reign of the Emperor Justinian was imported into Europe from the country of the Seres, a people of Eastern Asia, supposed to be the Chinese, from, whom it derived its name.  During the reign of Justinian two monks brought the eggs of the silkworm to Byzantium from Serinda in India, and the manufacture of silk became a royal monopoly of the Roman Empire.