Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/194

182 Natural History supplies many clews to the character of the fabrics woven and worn by these chiefs among the wool manufacturers of antiquity. The excellence and variety of the fabrics they made were wonderful in view of their simple tools. The almost infinite variety of forms and textures of fabrics now familiar are simply variations of typical fabrics which these people—as great in the arts of peace as they were great in war—invented or adapted from other nations.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Florence, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa were the seats of vast wool manufactures conducted on a system somewhat akin to the modern factory system and forming the basis of the great commerce which built up those cities and made them the centers of a wealth, culture, and magnificence which modern times may rival but not surpass. Florence had attained such pre-eminence. in the wool manufacture that in 13-40 it had more than two hundred establishments, making annually more than eighty thousand pieces, and employing in their production thirty thousand persons. At Genoa were made all descriptions of carded and combed fabrics. The wool industry is forever associated with the discovery of the American continent, for the father of Christopher Columbus was a wool comber at Genoa; and the great discoverer himself, in the intervals of his schooling, assisted his father in the preparation of the fleece for the spindle. From the Italian cities came the woolen cloths which for centuries clothed the world with which they traded. Thence the wool manufacture gravitated to the Netherlands, and from Flanders, its chief seat there, it spread to all the great manufacturing nations of Christendom.

During the middle ages the working of wool was conducted by small groups of special workmen in various French cities, Paris, Tours, Arras, in the gynecia of the princes and dukes, and especially in the interior and dependencies of the monasteries. In Monteil's History of the French in Different Periods is given a description of the manner of working wool in a French convent in the fourteenth century, which is worth quoting for the light it throws upon the process of manipulating wool before and at the time of Columbus's discovery, and as illustrating the similarity in methods between that time and the present: "Let us examine what operations wools of the abbey farm must undergo from the moment the sheep are sheared, up to the moment when they are placed upon the shoulders of the respectable dames of the convent. I shall first carry the wools to the boilers to get out the grease and wash them; afterward I shall spread them on the drier; as soon as they are dry I shall beat them up; and I shall sort them, and divide them into two lots. On one side I shall put the long wools, suitable for the warp; on the other, the short wools,