MECHANICS AXD USEFUL AETS. 87 



by which these useful instruments are generally prepared, and it is cer- 

 tainly that employed in the new machine, excepting with regard to the 

 cutting tool and its movements. The new machine, like the older varieties, 

 completes the deep spiral crease only by a repetition of shallow cuts, each 

 scraping deeper than its predecessor one main point of difference lying 

 in the fact that the new machine carries the tool, or rather a series of tools, 

 on a slowly-revolving horizontal wheel the movement being continu- 

 ously rotative. This arrangement not only saves the time otherwise lost 

 in the return motion, but avoids the employment of much complex 

 mechanism. A point of equal or perhaps greater importance is gained in 

 dividing the destructive effect on the edges of the cutters between eight 

 tools, (that number being employed in each series,) so that, other things 

 being equal, this machine, once adjusted, would remain sharp eight times 

 as long the other. The simplicity and compactness of the rotary, how- 

 ever, allow four machines, so to speak, to be combined in one with 

 decided advantage, so that one of the ponderoxis constructions, which are 

 some four feet square and three feet high, throws out the finished article 

 with four times the rapidity, and remains in order, from the principles of 

 its construction, something like eight times as long as the older devices. 



THE SILK MANUFACTURE IN ENGLAND. 



All the silk heretofore manufactured in England, either into cloth or 

 spun yarn, has been from raw silk imported in the hank state, that is, 

 wound off the cocoons into hanks by the natives of those countries from 

 which the silk was imported. It was supposed that the winding off from 

 the cocoons could never be performed by machinery ; and as hand labor 

 was so much cheaper in China, India, and Italy than in England, it was 

 held by the English manufacturers that the cheapest way for them to obtain 

 it was in the state of raw silk yarn. We learn by the London Artisan, that 

 in all likelihood the English manufacturers will hereafter import all their 

 silk in cocoons, and wind it off themselves, at a great saving. This has 

 been effected by the invention of a new machine invented by John 

 Chadwick, a silk manufacturer in Manchester, and T. Dickens, a silk dyer. 

 The machine consists of an iron framework, about four feet wide, four 

 feet high, and four yards long. On each side there is a row of thirty 

 bobbins, arranged vertically, about eighteen inches from the floor. They 

 are furnished with the ordinary fliers for encircling them with the thread 

 as it is produced ; and to each of the sixty bobbins there is a motion, by 

 which each can be thrown out of gear independently of the others. Over 

 the bobbins there are on either side thirty copper tioughs or basin*, 

 containing water at a temperature of about 120 degrees. In each of the.>e 

 troughs float six Syrian cocoons, and the silk reeled" from these 360 

 cocoons by means the least complex in their nature. The continuous 

 fibre does not lie in circles upon the cocoon, but describes a form very 

 similar to the figure 8, placed on tiie surface in a longitudinal direction, 



