38 Fibres of the Hcuvaiian Islands. 



records of cotton are no less ancient, and Herodotus writes, "There 

 are trees which grow wild in India, the fruit of which is a wool 

 exceeding in beauty and qualit}' that of sheep. The Indians make 

 their clothes of this tree wool." (Herod, iii, 106.) The ancient 

 Hebrew writings are full of references to spinning and weaving. 

 White and violet hangings of cotton are described in Esther' as 

 adorning the king's palace, and the failure of flax is recorded by 

 Hosea (ii, 9) as among God's punishments. The Hindus have, 

 from time immemorable, been conversant with the manufacture of 

 the most exquisite muslin, which derives its name from Mosul, a 

 city famous for its manufadlure, on the Tigris. The ancient cities 

 Calicut, Damascus and Nanking point to the early origin of the 

 fabrics to which they have given their names. The use of papyrus 

 was well known to the Egyptians, and Pliny mentions its use by 

 these people for their matting and sails, and small boats are even 

 said to have been made of it. 



All fibres suited for weaving are charadterized either by irregu- 

 larities in their surface, which take the form of serrations or 

 dentations to prevent the individual fibres from slipping one upon 

 another, or they possess a more or less tendency to twist and curl. 

 In addition to these stru(ftural peculiarities the commercial value 

 of a fibre depends diredtly upon many other chara(5leristics, chief 

 of which are the length, strength, flexibility, texture and color of 

 the filaments, together with their composition, facility of cultiva- 

 tion and capacity for bleaching and taking dyes. 



Vegetable fibres consist as a rule of wood}' cylindrical cells, 

 generally overlapping one another and traversing the strucflure of 

 the plant to give it rigidity and strength. Wood cells occur most 

 plentifully in the bast layer which underlies the true bark. As, 

 however. Dicotyledonous plants are the only ones that possess a 

 true bark it is only this class of plant which yields bast fibre. 

 Among the chief bast or cortical fibres of commerce are flax, hemp 

 and jute. 



In Monocotyledons the fibrous cells are incorporated with the 

 fibro-vascular bundles which occur throughout the body of the 

 stems and leaves, forming, as it were, the supporting stru(5ture of 

 the plant. These bundles deprived of their soft cellular matter 



' Esther i, 6. The Hebrew carpus, Greek KOLOTTOLCrO'^. Sanscrit karpasa, was used to 

 denote either cotton or flax, and recent authorities render this passage describing the palace 

 Qf Ahasuerus (Xerxes) at Sliga "white and violet hangings of cotton." 



