in commerce, a well-known kind of cloth chiefly made of flax.—Linen was not worn by the Jews, Greeks, or Romans, as any part of their ordinary dress. Under tunicks of a finer texture supplied the place of shirts: Hence the occasion for frequent bathing. Alexander Severus was the first emperor who wore a shirt: but the use of so necessary a garment did not become common till long after him.

The linen manufacture was probably introduced into Britain with the first settlements of the Romans. The flax was certainly first planted by that nation in the British soil. The plant itself indeed appears to have been originally a native of the east. The woollen drapery would naturally be prior in its origin to the linen; and the fibrous plants from which the threads of the latter are produced, seems to have been first noticed and worked by the inhabitants of Egypt. In Egypt, indeed, the linen manufacture appears to have been very early: for even in Joseph's time it had risen to a considerable height. From the Egyptians the knowledge of it proceeded probably to the Greeks, and from them to the Romans. Even at this day the flax is imported among us from the eastern nations; the western kind being merely a degenerate species of it.

In order to succeed in the linen manufacture, one set of people should be confined to the ploughing and preparing the soil, sowing and covering the seed, to the weeding, pulling, rippling, and taking care of the new seed, and watering and dressing the flax till it is lodged at home: others should be concerned in the drying, breaking, scutching, and heckling the flax, to fit it for the spinners; and others in spinning and reeling it, to fit it for the weaver: others should be concerned in taking due care of the weaving, bleaching, beating, and finishing the cloth for the market. It is reasonable to believe, that if these several branches of the manufacture were carried on by distinct dealers in Scotland and Ireland, where our home-made linens are manufactured, the several parts would be better executed, and the whole would be afforded cheaper, and with greater profit.

**Staining of Linen.** Linen receives a black colour with much more difficulty than woollen or cotton. The black struck on linen with common vitriol and galls, or logwood, is very perishable, and soon washes out.—Instead of the vitriol, a solution of iron in four strong beer is to be made use of. This is well known to all the calico printers; and by the use of this, which they call their iron liquor, and madder-root, are the blacks and purples made which we see on the common printed linens. The method of making this iron-liquor is as follows: A quantity of iron is put into the four strong beer; and, to promote the dissolution of the metal, the whole is occasionally well stirred, the liquor occasionally drawn off, and the rust beat from the iron, after which the liquor is poured on again. A length of time is required to make the impregnation perfect; the solution being reckoned unfit for use till it has stood at least a twelvemonth. This solution stains the linen of a yellow, and different shades of buff-colour; and is the only known substance by which these colours can be fixed on linen. The cloth stained deep with the iron liquor, and afterwards boiled with madder, without any other addition, becomes of the dark colour which we see on printed linens and cottons; which, if not a perfect black, has a very near resemblance to it. Others are stained paler with the same liquor diluted with water, and come out purple.

Linens may also be stained of a durable purple by means of solution of gold in aqua regia. The solution for this purpose should be as fully saturated as possible; it should be diluted with three times its quantity of water; and if the colour is required deep, the piece, when dry, must be repeatedly moistened with it. The colour does not take place till a considerable time, sometimes several days, after the liquor has been applied: to hasten its appearance, the subject should be exposed to the sun and free air, and occasionally removed to a moist place, or moistened with water.—When solution of gold in aqua regia is soaked up in linen cloths, the metal may be recovered by drying and burning them.

The anacardium nut, which comes from the East Indies, is remarkable for its property of staining linen of a deep black colour, which cannot be washed out either with soap or alkaline ley. The stain is at first of a reddish-brown, but afterwards turns to a deep black on exposure to the air. The cashew-nut, called the *anacardium of the West-Indies*, differs from the oriental anacardium in its colouring quality. The juice of this nut is much paler than the other, and stains linen or cotton only of a brownish colour; which indeed is very durable, but does not at all change towards blackness.—There are, however, trees natives of our own colonies, which appear to contain juices of the same. same nature with those of India. Of this kind are several, and perhaps the greater number, of the species of the toxicodendron or poison-tree†. Mr Catefby, in his history of Carolina, describes one called there the poison-ash, from whose trunk flowed a liquid as black as ink, and supposed to be poisonous; which reputed poisonous quality has hitherto prevented the inhabitants from collecting or attempting to make any use of it. In the Philosophical Transactions for the year 1755, the Abbé Mazeas gives an account of three sorts of the toxicodendron raised in a botanic garden in France, containing in their leaves a milky juice, which in drying became quite black, and communicated the same colour to the linen on which it was dropped. The linen thus stained was boiled with soap, and came out without the least diminution of colour; nor did a strong ley of wood-ashes make any change in it. Several of these trees have been planted in the open ground in England, and some still remain in the bishop of London's garden at Fulham.

That species called by Mr Miller the true lac tree, was found by Dr Lewis to have properties of a similar kind. It contains in its bark, and the pedicles and ribs of the leaves, a juice somewhat milky, which soon changed in the air to a reddish-brown, and in two or three hours to a deep blackish or brownish-black colour: wherever the bark was cut or wounded, the incision became blackish; and on several parts of the leaves the juice had spontaneously exuded, and stained them of the same colour. This juice dropped on linen gave at first little or no colour, looking only like a spot of oil; but, by degrees, the part moistened with it darkened in the same manner as the juice itself. On washing and boiling the linen with soap, the stain not only was not discharged, but seemed to have its blackness rather improved; as if a brown matter, with which the black was manifestly debased, had been in part washed out, and left the black more pure.

As the milky juice of some of our common plants turn dark-coloured or blackish in drying, the Doctor was induced to try the effects of several of them on linen. The milks of wild-poppies, garden-poppies, dandelion, hawk-weed, and fow-thistle, gave brown or brownish-red stains, which were discharged by washing with soap; the milks of the fig-tree, of lettuces, and of different kinds of spurges, gave no colour at all. The colourless juice which flows from hop-stalks when cut, stains linen of a pale-reddish, or brownish-red, extremely durable; the colour was deepened by repeated applications of the juice, but it never made any approach to blackness. The juice of floes gave likewise a pale-brownish stain, which by repeated washings with soap, and being wetted with strong solution of alkaline salt, was darkened to a deeper brown; on baking the floes, their juice turns red; and the red stain which it then imparts to linen is, on washing with soap, changed to a pale-bluish, which also proves durable. These colours could not be deepened by repeated applications of the juice. The floes were tried in different states of maturity, from the beginning of September to the middle of December, and the event was always nearly the same.

In the fifth volume of Linnaeus's Amanites Academicæ, mention is made of a black colour obtained from two plants which grow spontaneously in Britain; the one is the adrea spicata, herb-christopher, or baneberries; the other the erica baccifera nigra, black-berried heath, crow-berries, or crake-berries. The juice of the bane-berries, boiled with alum, is said to yield a black ink; and the heath-berries, boiled also with alum, to dye linen of a purplish black.

Linum flowered with Gold-leaf. Dr Lewis informs us of a late manufacture established in London for embellishing linen with flowers and ornaments of gold-leaf. The linen, he says, looks whiter than most of the printed linens; the gold is extremely beautiful, and bears washing well. The Doctor informs us, that he had seen a piece which he was credibly informed had been washed three or four times, with only the same precautions which are used for the finer printed linens; and on which the gold continued entire, and of great beauty.—Concerning the process used in this manufacture, he gives us no particulars.

Poetile Linen, is a kind of amianthus, which consists of flexible, parallel, soft fibres, and which has been celebrated for the uses to which it has been applied, of being woven, and forming an incombustible cloth. Paper also, and wicks for lamps, have been made of it. See Amianthus and Asbestos.