1 82 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Natural History supplies many clews to the character of the 

 fabrics woven and worn by these chiefs among the wool manu- 

 facturers of antiquity. The excellence and variety of the fabrics 

 they made were wonderful in view of their simple tools. The 

 almost infinite variety of forms and textures of fabrics now famil- 

 iar are simply variations of typical fabrics which these people- 

 as great in the arts of peace as they were great in war invented 

 or adapted from other nations. 



In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Florence, Venice, Pisa, 

 and Genoa were the seats of vast wool manufactures conducted 

 on a system somewhat akin to the modern factory system and 

 forming the basis of the great commerce which built up those 

 cities and made them the centers of a wealth, culture, and mag- 

 nificence which modern times may rival but not surpass. Flor- 

 ence had attained such pre-eminence . in the wool manufacture 

 that in 13-40 it had more than two hundred establishments, mak- 

 ing annually more than eighty thousand pieces, and employing 

 in their production thirty thousand persons. At Genoa were 

 made all descriptions of carded and combed fabrics. The wool 

 industry is forever associated with the discovery of the American 

 continent, for the father of Christopher Columbus was a wool- 

 comber at Genoa ; and the great discoverer himself, in the inter- 

 vals of his schooling, assisted his father in the preparation of the 

 fleece for the spindle. From the Italian cities came the woolen 

 cloths which for centuries clothed the world with which they 

 traded. Thence the wool manufacture gravitated to the Nether- 

 lands, and from Flanders, its chief seat there, it spread to all 

 the great manufacturing nations of Christendom. 



During the middle ages the working of wool was conducted by 

 small groups of special workmen in various French cities, Paris, 

 Tours, Arras, in the gynecia of the princes and dukes, and espe- 

 cially in the interior and dependencies of the monasteries. In 

 Monteil's History of the French in Different Periods is given a 

 description of the manner of working wool in a French convent 

 in the fourteenth century, which is worth quoting for the light it 

 throws upon the process of manipulating wool before and at the 

 time of Columbus's discovery, and as illustrating the similarity 

 in methods between that time and the present : " Let us examine 

 what operations wools of the abbey farm must undergo from the 

 moment the sheep are sheared, up to the moment when they are 

 placed upon the shoulders of the respectable dames of the convent. 

 I shall first carry the wools to the boilers to get out the grease 

 and wash them ; afterward I shall spread them on the drier ; as 

 soon as they are dry I shall beat them up ; and I shall sort them, 

 and divide them into two lots. On one side I shall put the long 

 wools, suitable for the warp ; on the other, the short wools, suit- 



