Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/199

Rh but were entire, just as the cloth came from the frame, for before they began to weave they settled the required length and breadth, more or less."

That these two civilizations should have existed for centuries on the American continents, with high forms of civilization, including the textile arts, developed in both, but neither in any way springing from the other, or from any European source, is not more surprising than that the rest of the population of the Western hemisphere should have been without these forms of civilization. There exist to-day communities in which the arts of spinning and weaving have never been known, and are still unknown. Wherever civilization is indigenous, there these arts have existed as one of the first evidences of it, and the progress in these fields has everywhere been indicative of the general progress of civilization and the capacity of the people of the several countries to adopt and take advantage of the new sources of wealth and comfort which steam, with the mechanical inventions of which it is parent, places at the disposal of capital and labor. The transformation of the woolen industry, through these agencies, has been complete, as we shall now show.

When primitive woman made the first discovery regarding the capacity of the fleece of the sheep to be spun into a yarn, and that yarn to be woven into a cloth, she compassed the whole of the discovery with reference to wool manufacture. All that has since happened has simply been the perfecting and the enlarging of that original discovery. We still spin and we still weave; and the fabrics we make are of no firmer texture or more beautiful design than those which existed in prehistoric times. We have substituted steam for the human hand; we have simplified and multiplied processes and thus increased the variety and the amount of the product and decreased the cost of production. But throughout all the changes in yarn-spinning, the rotary spindle continues to be the essential implement; all the improvements have had for their objects, first, the application of mechanical methods for rotating the spindle; second, automatic methods for attenuating the fibers; and, third, devices for working large groups of spindles simultaneously. Weaving has always been done by warp yarns, or threads, running longitudinally, and weft or intersecting yarns thrown at right angles across the warp by hand, by hand-shuttle, or by power-shuttle. Invention seems, at first sight, to have carried the automatic principle as far as it can go, in both operations, and in all the preliminary and subsequent processes. But a study of the steps of this evolution will convince us that past inventions, so far