Section X.—BOTANY AND ZOOLOGY.

Byall those for whom, among other allurements drawing them on in their studies of Botany and Zoology, one is the gratification they feel in learning how many of the subjects belonging to these two sections of the natural sciences were known, and how they used to be depicted during the middle ages, this large collection of textiles figured so often with birds, beasts and flowers, will be heartily welcomed.

Our Zoological Society prides itself, and in justice, with treating the Londoners with the first sight of a live giraffe; but here its members themselves may behold,Nos. 8591-91A, p. 224;8599, p. 228, the earliest known portrait of that curious quadruped sketched upon Sicilian silks of the fourteenth century.

We once listened to a discussion between English sportsmen about the travels of the pheasant from its native home by the banks of the river Phasis at Colchis, and the time when it reached this island. Both parties agreed in believing its coming hither to have been somewhat late. Be that as it may, our country gentlemen will see their favourite bird figured here,No. 1325, p. 60.

About the far-famed hunting cheetahs of India, we have heard, and still hear much; and on pieces of silk from eastern looms, in this collection, they are often to be seen figured.

With regard to the way in which all kinds of fowl, as well as animals are represented on these stuffs, there is one thing which we think will strike most observers who compare the drawing of them here with thatof the same objects among the illuminations in old MSS. The birds and beasts on the textiles are always very much better rendered than in the wood-cuts to be found in our old black-letter books, from Caxton’s days upwards, especially in such works as that of Æsop and the rest. Figures of animals and of birds in manuscripts are hardly better, as we may see in the prints of our own Sir John Maundevile’s Travels, and the French “Bestiaire d’Amour,” par R. de Fournival, lately edited by C. Hippeau. Scarcely better does their design fare in illuminated MSS. Belonging to the Duke of Northumberland, and now in the library at Alnwick castle is the finest Salisbury missal we have ever beheld. This tall thick folio volume was, some time during the end of the fourteenth century, begun to be written and illuminated by a Benedictine monk—one John Whas—who carried on this gorgeous book as far as page 661. From the two Leonine verses which we read there, it would seem that this labour of love carried on for years at early morn in the scriptorium belonging to Sherbourne Abbey, Dorsetshire, had broken, as well it might, the health of the monk artist, of whom it is said:—

“Librum scribendo Ion Whas monachus laborabat;Et mane surgendo multum corpus macerabat.”

“Librum scribendo Ion Whas monachus laborabat;

Et mane surgendo multum corpus macerabat.”

Among his other tastes, this Benedictine had that for Natural History, and in the beautifully illuminated Kalendar at the beginning of this full missal, almost every month is pointed out by the presence of some bird, or fish, or flower, peculiar to that season, with its name beneath it,—for instance, “Ys is a throstle,” &c. However much the thrush’s song may have cheered him at his work at Spring-tide peep of day, Whas did not draw his bird with half the individuality and truthfulness which we find in birds of all sorts that are figured upon Sicilian stuffs woven at the very period when the English Benedictine was at work within the cloisters of his house in Dorsetshire—a fact which may lead the ornithologist to look with more complacency upon those textiles here patterned with Italian birds.

For Botany, it has not gone so well; yet, notwithstanding this drawback, there are to be seen figured upon these textiles plants and trees which, though strangers to this land and to Europe, and their forms no doubt, oddly and clumsily represented, yet, as they keep about them the same character, we may safely believe to have a true type in nature, which at last by their help we shall be able to find out. Such is the famous “homa,” or “hom,”—the sacred tree—among the ancient followers of Zoroaster, as well as the later Persians. It is to be seen figured on many silks in this collection of real or imitated Persian textiles, woven at various periods during the middle ages.

From the earliest antiquity a tradition came down throughout middle Asia, of some holy tree—perhaps the tree of life spoken of as growing in Paradise.—Gen. ii. 9. Some such a tree is very often to be seen sculptured on Assyrian monuments; and, by the place which it holds there, must have been held in peculiar, nay religious veneration. Upon those important remains from Nineveh, now in the British Museum, and figured in Mr. Layard’s fine work, it appears as the object of homage for the two men symbolized as sacerdotal or as kingly personages, between whom it invariably stands. It is to be found equally figured upon the small bucket meant for religious rites,[459]as embroidered upon the upper sleeve of the monarch’s tunic.[460]From Fergusson’s “Palaces of Nineveh, and Persepolis restored,” we learn that it was frequently to be found sculptured as an architectural ornament. When seen done in needlework upon dresses, the two animals—sometimes winged bulls, sometimes gazelles—which its umbel of seven flowers is separating, are shown with bended knees, as if in worship of it. Always this plant is represented as a shrub, sometimes bearing a series of umbels with seven flowers sprouting, each at the end of a tangled bough; sometimes as a stunted tree with branches growing all the way up right out of a thick trunk with ovated leaves; but the height never looks beyond that of a good sized man. Never for one moment can it be taken as any conventionalism for a tree, since it is as distinct an imitation of a particular plant, as is the figure of the palm which occurs along with it. To us, it has every look of belonging to the family of Asclepiadeæ, or one of its near kindred.

The few Parsees still to be found in East India, are the only followers of Persia’s olden religious practices; and in his “Essays on the sacred writings, language, and religion of the Parsees,” Haug tells us,[461]that those people yet hold a certain plant—the Homa, or hom?—to be sacred, and from it squeeze a juice to be used by them in their religious services. To our seeming, those buckets in the left hand of many an Assyrian figure were for holding this same liquor.

Can the “hom” of the old Persians be the same as the famous Sidral Almuntaha which bears as many leaves inscribed with names as there are men living on the earth? At each birth a fresh leaf bearing the name of the newly born bursts out, and, when any one has reached the end of his life, the leaf withers and falls off.[462]

Though unable to identify among the plants of Asia, which was the “hom” or tree of life, held so sacred by the Assyrians and later Persians, we know enough about that king of fruits—the “pine-apple”—as to correct a great mistake into which those have fallen who hitherto have had to write about the patterns figured on ancient or mediæval textiles. In their descriptions, we are perpetually told of the pine-apple appearing there; and at a period when the Ananas, so far from having been even once beheld in the old world, had never been dreamed of. Among the Peruvians our pine-apple, the “Nanas,” was first found and seen by Europeans. Hardly more than two hundred years ago was a single fruit of it brought to any place in the old world. A little over a century has it been cultivated here in England; and, as far as our memory goes, a pine-apple, fifty years ago, had never been planted in any part of Italy or Sicily, nor so much as seen. Writing, October 17, 1716, from Blankenburg, and telling her friend all about a royal dinner at which she had just been, Lady Mary Wortley Montague says:—“What I thought worth all the rest (were) two ripe Ananasses, which, to my taste, are a fruit perfectly delicious. You know they are naturally the growth of Brazil, and I could not imagine how they came here, but by enchantment. Upon enquiry, I learned that they have brought their stoves to such perfection, &c. I am surprised we do not practise in England so useful an invention.”[463]As turnips grow in England, so do artichokes all over middle and south Italy, as well as Sicily, large fields are full of them. Put side by side with the pine-apple, and its narrow stiff leaves, the artichoke in bloom amid its graceful foliage, shows well; and every artistic eye will see that the Sicilian weaver, so fond of flowers and nice foliage for his patterns, must have chosen his own vegetable, unfolding its beauties to him at every step he took, and not a fruit of which he had never heard, and which he had never looked upon.

In his description of fruits or flowers woven on a textile, let not the youthful or unwary writer be led astray by older men with a reputation howsoever high for learning other than botanical. Some years ago we were reading with great delight a tale about some things that happened in the third century, and near Carthage. Though avowedly a fiction, most of its incidents were facts, so admirably put together that they seemed to have been drawn by the pen of one who had lived upon the spot. But taking one of his personages to a walk amid the hills running down to the shores of North Africa, the writer leads him through a narrow glen tangled over head, and shaded with sweet smelling creepers andclimbers, among which he sees the passion-flower in full bloom. Now, as every species—save one from China of late introduction—that we have of this genus of plants, came to the old world from the new one, to speak of them as growing wild in Africa, quite fourteen hundred years before they could have been seen there, and America was known, is spoiling a picture otherwise beautifully sketched.

[459]Layard’s Discoveries at Nineveh, abridged, p. 46.

[460]Ibid. p. 245.

[461]Pp. 132, 239.

[462]The Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud, or Biblical Legends of Mussulmans compiled, &c., by Dr. G. Weil, pp. 183, 184.

[463]Letters, t. i. p. 105, London, 1763.

With some, there perhaps may be a wish to know what was the origin of this collection.

As is set forth, in the “Church of Our Fathers,”[464]some thirty years ago there began to grow up, amid a few, a strong desire to behold a better taste in the building of churches, and the design of every ecclesiastical accessory. Our common sympathies on all these points brought together the late Mr. A. Welby Pugin, and him who writes these lines, and they became warm friends. What were the results to Pugin through our intercourse he himself has acknowledged in his “Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture,” p. 67. To think of anything and do it, were, with Pugin, two consecutive actions which followed one another speedily. While at Birmingham Hardman was working in metal, after drawings by Pugin, and putting together a stained-glass window from one of his cartoons, a loom at Manchester, which had been geared after his idea, was throwing off textiles for church use, and orphreys, broad and narrow, were being wove in London: the mediæval court at Hyde Park, in the year 1851, was the gem of our first Exhibition. Going back, a German lady took from England a cope made of the textiles that had been designed by Pugin. This vestment got into the hands of Dr. Bock, whose feelings were, as they still are, akin to our own in a love for all the beauties of the mediæval period. While so glad of his new gift, it set this worthy canon of Aix-la-Chapelle thinking that other and better patterns were to be seen upon stuffs of an old and good period, could they be but found. He gave himself to the search, and took along with him, over the length and breadth of Europe, that energy and speed for which he is so conspicuous; and the gatherings from his many journeys, put together, made up the bulk of a most curious and valuable collection—the only one of its kind—which has found an abiding home in England, at the South Kensington Museum. Thus have these beautiful art-works of the loom become, after a manner, a recompense most gratefully received, to the nativeland of those men whose action, some thirty years ago, indirectly originated their being brought together.

Before laying down his pen, the writer of this Catalogue must put on record his grateful remembrances of the kindness shown so readily by M. Octave Delepierre, Secretary of Legation and Consul-General for Belgium, in rendering those inscriptions of old German upon that curious piece of hanging, No.1297, p. 296, as well as upon another piece of the same kind, No.1465, p. 298. For the like help afforded about the same, together with those several long inscriptions upon No.4456, p. 92, the writer is equally indebted to Dr. Appell; and, without the ready courtesy of the Rev. Eugene Popoff, the writer could not have been able to have given the Greek readings, hidden under Cyrillian characters, worked by the needle all around the Ruthenic Sindon, No.8278, p. 170.

17, Essex Villas,Kensington.

[464]T. i. pp. 348, &c.

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