aflor_) was painted.

[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 v