Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/16

 been the design of the author to select, arrange, and conserve all that was apposite to his subject and of intrinsic value. Thus has he endeavored to render the piles of antiquity, to adopt the words of a recent writer, well compacted—a process which has been begun in our times, and with such eminent success that even the men of the present age may live to see many of the thousand and one folios of the ancients handed over without a sigh to the trunk-maker.

The ample domains of Learning are fast being submitted to fresh irrigation and renewed culture,—the exclusiveness of the cloister has given place to an unrestricted distribution of the intellectual wealth of all times. What civilization has accomplished in the physical is also being achieved in the mental world. The sterile and inaccessible wilderness is transformed into the well-tilled garden, abounding in luxurious fruits and fragrant flowers. It is the golden age of knowledge—its Paradise Regained. The ponderous works of the olden time have been displaced by the condensing process of modern literature; yielding us their spirit and essence, without the heavy, obscuring folds of their former verbal drapery. We want real and substantial knowledge; but we are a labor-saving and a time-economizing people,—it must therefore be obtained by the most compendious processes. Except those with whom learning is the business of life, we are too generally ignorant of the mighty mysteries which Nature has heaped around our path; ignorant, too, of many of the discoveries of science and philosophy, in ancient as well as modern times. To meet the exigencies of our day, a judgment in the selection and condensation of works designed for popular use is demanded—a facility like that of the alchymist, extracting from the crude ores of antiquity the fine gold of true knowledge.

The plan of this work naturally divides itself into four departments. The first division is devoted to the consideration of Silk, its early history and cultivation in China and various other parts of the world; illustrated by copious citations from ancient writers: From among whom to instance Homer, we learn that embroidery and tapestry were prominent arts with the Thebans, that poet deriving many of his pictures of domestic