Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/298

286 weaving; previous to that age they spend a year or so on the board watching the other women so that they may get accustomed to the work. If a young woman who has been brought up to the loom gets married, the first thing she does is to try and obtain an order for a carpet, so that the weaving of carpets passes from one generation to another. Every stitch in the carpet is made separately, and it is afterward clipped with the scissors and beaten down. In a good carpet there are about ten thousand stitches to every square foot. The clipping must be done every time with equal care, otherwise when the carpet is finished the pile will be short in some places and longer in others. Upon the beating down depends the closeness of the texture; the more a weaver beats her stitches down, the finer, of course, the carpet is. She knows how many stitches she has to weave to every quarter of a Persian yard; but she generally makes less, in order to save wool, time, and trouble. The designs are the individual property of the weavers, and are protected by law. The shades of color are a matter of importance, and attention is paid to having them in harmony with the varying tastes of the European markets. Besides woolen carpets, rugs are exported, woven entirely of silk. The weaving of such rugs is done in the same way as the weaving of carpets, but the labor is far greater in proportion, as they are always of a very fine make. Such rugs can be used as table or sofa covers, portieres, etc., but, as they are made of pure silk, they are very costly.

Holy Stones of the East and the West.—A curious paper was read by Mr. Charles G. Leland at the International Congress of Orientalists concerning the salagrama stone of India and the salagrana of the Toscana Romana, as a curious link connecting the East and West. The Indian salagrama is a kind of ammonite, the size of an orange, and having a hole in it. According to the legend, Vishnu the Preserver, when pursued by the Destroyer, was changed by Maya into the stone, through the hole of which the Destroyer as a worm wound his way. The Italian salagrana is a stalagmite, which is believed by the people, on account of its resemblance to the little mounds thrown up by earthworms, to be such a mound petrified. They carry it in a red bag, along with certain magical herbs, and pronounce over it an incantation to the effect that the irregularities and cavities in it have the property of bewildering the evil eye and depriving it of its power. The author was informed by believers in such things that anything like grains, irregular and confused surfaces, interlaced serpents, or intricate works, blunted the evil eye. Interlaced cords are sold in Florence as charms. Even the convolvulus is grown in gardens against the evil eye. In the Norse mythology, Odin as a worm bored his head through a stone in order to get at "the mead of poetry." Hence all stones with holes in them are known as Odin stones, also as "holy stones," and are much used at the North as amulets. Hung at the head of the bed, they are supposed to drive away nightmare. Possibly there is a connection with the salagrana here. So interlacings in decoration may be originally designed to avert the evil eye and bad luck. A recent traveler in Persia was told that the patterns on carpets in that country were made intricate so that the evil eye might be bewildered. In the salagrana of Italy the number of grains or protuberances must be counted one by one before the witch can do evil. In the Arabian Nights the ghoul Amina must eat her rice grain by grain; and in South Carolina the negroes protect a person who is bedridden or nightmared by strewing rice round his bed, which the witch, when she comes, must count grain by grain before she can touch her victim.

Two Ancient Races.—Describing, in the International Oriental Congress, his excavation of the pyramid of Medum—the tomb of King Senefru, of the third Egyptian dynasty, and the oldest known building in the world—Mr. H. Flinders Petrie spoke of the entire skeletons which had been obtained of men of that remote period (some 4000 years ) as providing an anatomical study of importance for ethnology. The peculiar mode of interment of most of these persons shows that a religious difference then existed. The bodies of the highest class or race were interred, extended at full length, with vases of pottery or stone, and head-rests; while the greater number of the bodies were interred