Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/195

Rh for the filling. I shall afterward oil the wools for the warp with hog's lard or butter; after which I shall comb them; and, since now the king finds it best that we should card the wool for the filling, I shall card them. I shall have the first spun on the distaff, and the last only on the spinning-wheel. I shall put two harnesses on the loom, for stuffs with a simple web, like cloth, and three or four harnesses for twilled stuffs, according to the kind or quality of the cloth, sometimes fourteen hundred, sometimes eighteen hundred yarns of warp. I shall full the cloths in the mill, to cleanse and felt them. I shall give them a turn of the teasles, to draw out the hair from the wool. I shall full them again, and sometimes I shall sulphur them; sometimes, also, I shall shear them with the big shears. I shall give them a light turn of the teasles when they want my cloths all ready finished. I shall repeat these operations once or twice; and, finally, if I don't want to leave my cloths in the white, I shall carry them to the dyer; if not, I shall press and colander them." The operations here quaintly described remain the same, in principle, as five centuries ago. Only the means of attaining identical results have been profoundly modified. Outside the Low Countries, the wool manufacture had made little progress on the Continent, at the time of the discovery of America. The industry received its first great impulse in France near the close of the sixteenth century. The Edict of Nantes restored to that country the scattered merchants and workmen of the Protestant faith. They brought from the Low Countries, where they had wandered, the arts of spinning, weaving, and dyeing woolens, and founded the first establishments for making woolen cloths. The infant industries were finally planted in their present nourishing seats by Colbert, the illustrious minister of Louis XIV. Seductive offers attracted skilled artisans to her towns. The foundations were laid for the splendid industries