AMERICAN INDUSTRIES SINCE COLUMBUS. 187 



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, in- 

 cluding 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 West- 

 ern hemisphere should have been without these forms of civiliza- 

 tion. There exist to-day communities in which the arts of spin- 

 ning 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 civiliza- 

 tion and the capacity of the people of the several countries to 

 adopt and take advantage of the new sources of wealth and com- 

 fort which steam, with the mechanical inventions of which it is 

 parent, places at the disposal of capital and labor. The transfor- 

 mation of the woolen industr} r , through these agencies, has been 

 complete, as we shall now show. 



The Evolution of the Card. 



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 en- 

 larging 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-spin- 

 ning, the rotary spindle continues to be the essential implement ; 

 all the improvements have had for their objects, first, the appli- 

 cation 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 longi- 

 tudinally, 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 



