176 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN INDUSTRIES 



SINCE COLUMBUS. 



V. THE MANUFACTURE OF WOOL. 



By S. N. DEXTER NORTH. 



I REMEMBER the interest inspired in boyhood days by a 

 certain colored map in a curious and recondite book in my 

 father's library. This map undertook to group the ancient world 

 into divisions according to the raw materials principally utilized 

 in the clothing of the people. As a boy I was impressed by the 

 fact that the sheep's-wool and goat's-hair countries, marked on 

 the map in red, comprised nearly the whole of its space in a broad 

 belt running from Hispania and Gaul on the west, covering the 

 greater portion of what is now Germany and Austria, all of Italy, 

 much of Russia, European and Asiatic Turkey, Arabia, and Per- 

 sia. The northeast corner, occupied by the vast terra incognita 

 of the ancients which we now call China, was marked on the map 

 as the only part of the globe whose people dressed in silk fabrics. 

 Egypt was christened the home of the ancient linen manufacture, 

 and the niap was colored in a manner to indicate that flax was 

 also indigenous in several other small sections, mostly contiguous 

 to the upper Rhine, and all of it bordering on rivers. India stood 

 alone, the solitary country whose primitive inhabitants possessed 

 and utilized the priceless inheritance of cotton. The great regions 

 north of the wool belt were vaguely outlined on the map as peo- 

 pled by barbarians who clothed themselves in skins, furs, and 

 felts, and to whom the art of weaving was presumably unknown. 

 One fond of the contrasts of history could not fail to be struck 

 by the fact that the British Isles, now the home of the textile in- 

 dustries, were included by the map-maker in this vast expanse of 

 country where the wheel and the distaff added nothing to the 

 comforts of life. 



If we were now to construct another map on the same prin- 

 ciple, we should find the vivid colors which stood for the several 

 fibers on the old map so blended and run together through the 

 great belt line of the temperate zones that neither fiber would 

 here predominate over any other. To-day all the fibers known 

 to the ancients are used by all the civilized people of the globe, 

 each for the purpose for which it is found to be best adapted. 

 Each has had an evolution peculiar to itself, and each has been 

 the gainer by every discovery or invention that has simplified the 

 manipulation and thus extended the use of the other. 



The sheep was the first animal which man learned to domesti- 

 cate for his own service, and none has proved more useful to him. 



