AMERICAN INDUSTRIES SINCE COLUMBUS. 179 



and embossed piano-cloths, ladies' skirts, floor coverings, often 

 with highly artistic designs, material for roofs and protectors 

 against weather, piano-hammers, shoe-linings, etc. It is difficult 

 to imagine any department of industry in which wool, in its felted 

 form, does not somewhere play its part. Thus we have taken the 

 simple discovery of antiquity and made it among the chief in- 

 strumentalities of civilization. The Tartars and kindred peoples 

 who occupy the middle and northern regions of Asia, and whose 

 manners and customs have remained unchanged from the most 

 remote antiquity, employ the felted wool in a variety of func- 

 tions, only less important than the supplying of foods. Both 

 their clothing and their habitations have consisted of felt since a 

 knowledge of them first went upon record in the fourth century. 

 The process of felting was generally known among ancient na- 

 tions. The Greeks gave to it the name ^A^Sis, from 7riAeo>, to com- 

 press ; literally, a compression, or thickening, of the wool. The 

 ancients employed felt for a great variety of uses, just as we do, 

 the chief being to make coverings for the head, the most common 

 form among the Greeks and Romans being the skull-cap. 



When and where and how the discovery was made that the 

 fiber of wool could be drawn and twisted into a thread, which in 

 turn could be woven into a cloth, can not be told. The process 

 devised at the dawn of civilization remains to the present day, 

 viz., the producing of a long, continuous thread from the short 

 fiber, and then weaving these threads into a compact network. 

 The honor of the original discovery was claimed by all the 

 nations of pre-Christian civilization, and probably belonged ex- 

 clusively to none. 



The distaff and loom must have had contemporary origin in 

 different countries, for they were equally utilized, with little 

 variation in form, in the spinning and weaving of wool, silk, 

 linen, and cotton. Always it was the occupation of the women, 

 and generally a domestic operation ; although there are evidences 

 that the factory system, so far from being a modern institution, 

 existed three thousand years ago in Egypt, where many women 

 spun in one building together. One of the discoveries at Pompeii 

 is a veritable woolen factory, containing various machines for 

 carding and weaving wool. 



Spinning was the occupation of the lowly and the high born 

 alike. Among the pastoral nations the men tended the flocks, 

 while the women spun the wool. This arrangement of the domes- 

 tic economy of the ancients has found its parallel in all countries 

 and all ages. 



The peasant's wife and daughters made their own homespun, 

 and ladies of royal rank occupied their leisure in the fabrication 

 of the garments with which they adorned their persons. Golden 



