Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/866

 ; and above these are the Maoris of New Zealand, with their cloaks of the leaves of an agave-like plant laid upon each other like scales. The South-Sea Islanders have in the paper-mulberry a plant which serves the same purpose to them as the fig-tree to the people of Unyoro, from the bark of which they prepare the tapa by soaking and beating. They illustrate another development of industry in the adornment of their clothes, for which they have invented an endless number of designs, many of them of considerable merit. This stage of civilization is also often marked by a corresponding development of the potter's art, and of skill in ornamenting vessels. From the method of using the whole stuff of the bark to the art of separating its fibers and spinning and weaving them into a cloth is a great step. The processes of spinning and weaving are as varied as are the people who carry them on, and are largely determined by the nature of the material to which they have to be applied.

Dr. David August Rosenthal, in his "Synopsis Plantarum Diaphorecarum" (1862, Erlangen), counts, among twelve hundred useful plants, three hundred and sixty species which are fit for weaving, spinning, basket-work, cordage, etc.—species which are distributed over the whole earth, and of which nearly every country has some which may be cultivated with profit.

Dr. Grothe divides the textile fibers into seed, bark, stalk, and leaf fibers. Those of the first, class, the seed-fibers, are derived principally from the species of cotton, concerning all of which we have as yet no comprehensive treatise. Several other families of very diversified character afford seed-fibers, for which no method of application has yet been found which would permit them to be compared with the cotton. The plants affording valuable bark, or bark-fibers, are far more numerous. Dr. Grothe enumerates thirty-one families, of which seventeen are dicotyledonous, twelve monocotyledonous, one is a gymnosperm, and one is a fern. Among the dicotyledonous plants are species of flax, linden, birch, mallows, sterculiacæ (or silk-cottons), thymelaceæ (Daphne, leatherwood), asclepiads, apocynaceæ (dogbanes), nettle-plants, leguminous plants, mimosæ, spurge, willow, myrtle, bread-fruit, composite, and byttneriaceæ. The cultivation of the flax-plant has extended to the antipodes. Near to it in importance are the plants of the linden family, which afford numerous species suitable for basket-work and for woven fabrics. At their head stands the corchorus (not the so-called Corchorus japonicus, or Japan rose of the gardens, which is a spiræa), of which the species olitorius and capsularis are the plants of the jute-fiber, and have recently attained an extraordinary value. The cultivation of these plants, which was formerly carried on only in India and the Sunda Islands, has spread to the Southern United States, Brazil, Australia, New Caledonia, Mauritius, Guiana, and Algeria, and the production of the fiber, according to Dr. Grothe, already equals half that of cotton. Other