[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 vegetale).

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 introduced within the nest of leaves.

[Illustration:  FIG. 16.]

Into the detailed study of the intricacies of this subject I cannot here enter; the East-Asian influences are not to be neglected, which had probably even in early times an effect upon the form that was assumed, and have fused the correct style of compound flowers for flat ornament with the above-mentioned forms, so as to produce peculiar patterns; we meet them often in the so-called Persian textures and flat ornaments (Fig. 16).

We now come to the third group of forms—­the so-called Cashmere pattern, or Indian palmetta.  The developed forms, which, when they have attained their highest development, often show us outlines that are merely fanciful, and represent quite a bouquet of flowers leaning over to one side, and springing from a vessel (the whole corresponding to the Roman form with the vessel), must be thrown to one side, while we follow up the simpler forms, because in this case also we have no information as to either the where or the when the forms originated. (Figs. 17, 18, 19.)

[Illustration:  FIG. 17.]

Here again we are struck by resemblances to the forms that were the subjects of our previous study, we even come across direct transitional forms, which differ from the others only by the lateral curve of the apex of the leaf; sometimes it is the central part, the spadix, that is bent outward, and the very details show a striking agreement with the structure of the aroid inflorescence, so much so that one might regard them as actually copied from them.

[Illustration:  FIG. 18.]

This form of ornament has been introduced into Europe since the French expedition to Egypt, owing to the importation of genuine Cashmere shawls.  (When it cropped up in isolated forms, as in Venice in the fifteenth century, it appears not to have exerted any influence; its introduction is perhaps rather to be attributed to calico-printing.) Soon afterward the European shawl-manufacture, which is still in a flourishing state, was introduced.  Falcot informs us that designs of a celebrated French artist, Couder, for shawl-patterns, a subject that he studied in India itself, were exported back to that country and used there (Fig. 20).