The Albany register. [volume] (Albany, Or.) 1868-18??, 1873-02-28

Stucc0 OF tnelr walls tneir kings
holding court, their armies march
ing out, their craftsmen in the ship
yard with the ships floating in the
dock, and in fact we trace all their
rites and customs painted in undy-
ing colors. The French who went
to Egypt with Napoleon said that
all the colors were perfect except
the greenish.white, which is the,
hardest for us. They had no diff.
Guilty with the T'yrian purple. The.
burned city of Pompeii was . city
of stucco. All the houses are stuc-,
co outside, and it is stained with
Tyrian purple-the royal color Of
antiquity.
But you can never rely on the,
name of a color after a thousand
years. 50 the Tvrian purple is al
most a red-about the color Of
these curtains. This is a city Of all
red. II has been buried seventeen
hundred years, and If you take a
shovel now and clear away the
ashes this color flames up upon you
a great zeal richer than anything
we can produce. You can 90 down
into the narrow vault which Nero
built him as retreat from the great
heat, and yen, will find the walls
painted all over with fanciful de-
signs in arabesque, which have been
buried beneath the earth fifteen
hundred years; but when the peas
ants light it up with their torches
the colors flash out before you as
fresh as they were in the days Of
St. Paul. Your fellow.citizen, Mr..
Page, spent twelve years in Venice
studying Titiau's method of mixing
his colors, and he thinks he has got
it. Yet come down from Titan,
whose colors are wonderfully and
perfectly fresh, to Sir Joshua Rey-.
nolds, and although his coIors are
not yet q hundred years old, they
are fading; the colors OH his lipsarc
dying out, and the cheeks are losing
their tilts. lie did not know how
to mix we'll. All this mastery Of
color is as yet unequaled. Ii you
should go with that most delightful
Of all lecturers, Professor Tyndall,
be would show you in the spectrum
the vanishing rays of violet, and
prove to yon thatbeyond their limit
there are rays still more delicate
and to you invisible, but which he,
by chemical paper, will make viSi-
BILE; and he will tell you that prob
ably, though you see three or four
inches more than 800 years ago
your predecessors did, and yet 800
years after our SUCCESSORS will sur.
pass onr limit. The French have a
theory that there is a certain deli
cate shadow Of blue that Europeans
cannot zee. lii one Of his lectures
to his students, Rnskin opened his
Catholic mass-book and said: "Gen-
tlemen, we are the lest chemists in
the world. No Englishmal ever
could doubt that. But we cannot
make such scarlet as that, and
even it we could it would not last
for twenty years. Yet this is 500
years old" The Frenchman says:
81 am the best dyer in Europe; no
body can equal me, and nobody eau
surpa>s Lyons" Yet in Cashmerp,
where the girls make shawls worth
$4,000, they will show him 300
distinct culors, which he not only
cannot make, but cannot eyen dis
tipguish. When | was ip Rome, it
a lady wished to wear a halt dozen
culorS at a masquerade, and have
them all in harmony, she woubl g.
to the Jews, for the. Oriental eye Is
better than even those Of France Or
italy, Of which we think - highly,
ANCIENT MASTER ARTISANS.
Taking the metals. the Bible iii
its first chapters shows that man
first conquered metals therein Asia,
and IN that spot to-day he can
work more wonders with those
metals than we can.
One Of the surprises that tha
European artists received when the
English plundered the summer