Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/425

 for its fineness and softness ; but the raw material was in all probability imported.

"Flax," observes Professor Müller, "was grown and manufactured in Southern Etruria from ancient times, and thus the Tarquinii were enabled to furnish sail-cloth for the fleet of Scipio: yarn for making nets was produced on the banks of the Tiber, and fine linen for clothing in Falerii ." This account agrees remarkably with the views of Micali, and those historians who maintain the Egyptian origin of the Etrurians.

Pliny (xix. 1, 2.) mentions various kinds of flax of superior excellence, which were produced in the plains of the Po and Ticino; in the country of the Peligni (in Picenum); and about Cumæ in Campania. No flax, he says, was whiter or more like wool than that of the Peligni.

In the next chapter Pliny gives an account of the mode of preparing flax; plucking it up by the roots, tying it into bundles, drying it in the sun, steeping, drying again, beating it with a mallet on a stone, and lastly hackling it, or, as he says, "combing it with iron hooks." This may be compared with the preceding extract from Colonel Leake's Journal, and with chapter 97 of Bartholomæus Anglicus, De Proprietabus Rerum, which is perhaps partly copied from Pliny and treats of the manufacture of flax, steeping it in water, &c., and of its use for clothes, nets, sails, thread, and curtains.

In Spain there was a manufacture of linen at Emporium, which lay on the Mediterranean not far from the Pyrenees. According to Pliny (l. c.) remarkably beautiful flax was produced in Hispania Citerior near Tarraco. He ascribes its splendor to the virtues of the river-water flowing near Tarraco, in which the flax was steeped and prepared. Still further southward on the same coast we find Setabis, the modern Xativa, which is celebrated by various authors for the beauty of its linen, and especially for linen sudaria, or handkerchiefs: