Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/191

Rh and embossed piano-cloths, ladies' skirts, floor coverings, often with highly artistic designs, material for roofs and protectors against weather, piano-hammers, shoe-linings, etc. It is difficult to imagine any department of industry in which wool, in its felted form, does not somewhere play its part. Thus we have taken the simple discovery of antiquity and made it among the chief instrumentalities of civilization. The Tartars and kindred peoples who occupy the middle and northern regions of Asia, and whose manners and customs have remained unchanged from the most remote antiquity, employ the felted wool in a variety of functions, only less important than the supplying of foods. Both their clothing and their habitations have consisted of felt since a knowledge of them first went upon record in the fourth century. The process of felting was generally known among ancient nations. The Greeks gave to it the name πίληδις, from πιλέω, to compress; literally, a compression, or thickening, of the wool. The ancients employed felt for a great variety of uses, just as we do, the chief being to make coverings for the head, the most common form among the Greeks and Romans being the skull-cap.

When and where and how the discovery was made that the fiber of wool could be drawn and twisted into a thread, which in turn could be woven into a cloth, can not be told. The process devised at the dawn of civilization remains to the present day, viz., the producing of a long, continuous thread from the short fiber, and then weaving these threads into a compact network. The honor of the original discovery was claimed by all the nations of pre-Christian civilization, and probably belonged exclusively to none.

The distaff and loom must have had contemporary origin in different countries, for they were equally utilized, with little variation in form, in the spinning and weaving of wool, silk, linen, and cotton. Always it was the occupation of the women, and generally a domestic operation; although there are evidences that the factory system, so far from being a modern institution, existed three thousand years ago in Egypt, where many women spun in one building together. One of the discoveries at Pompeii is a veritable woolen factory, containing various machines for carding and weaving wool.

Spinning was the occupation of the lowly and the high born alike. Among the pastoral nations the men tended the flocks, while the women spun the wool. This arrangement of the domestic economy of the ancients has found its parallel in all countries and all ages.

The peasant's wife and daughters made their own homespun, and ladies of royal rank occupied their leisure in the fabrication of the garments with which they adorned their persons. Golden