No. 151.] 167 



ing machines, teazeling machines, &c., also that beaiitifu] art imita^ 

 live of embroidery. The printing of figures upon clolh, so univer- 

 sally in use at the present day for ladies dresses, is not very ancient. 

 The same was at first done by \iand with wooden blocks, having the 

 figure cut upon the face of them; but it is now done with incredi- 

 ble despatch by a machine, the figures being engraved uj>on fine 

 copper rollers operating in such a machine. 



But it is not our design to enter into all the details of this numer- 

 ous class, time would fail; injustice will be done to our subject how- 

 ever, if we pass unnoticed, the card setting machine, the movements 

 of which are effected almost exclusively by cam motions, and the 

 importance of which, as a labor saving machine, nearly equals the 

 power loom itself. 



The material of which cloth is made, is in all cases, with the sin- 

 gle exception of silk, required to be brought from a promiscuous un- 

 defined state, into a regular longitudinal arrangement of the fibre, 

 by which a continuous uniform body of the material may be by va- 

 rious modes, extenuated and twisted into a thread, preparatory to its. 

 ultimate transformation into cloth by the loom. 



In this process of arrangement, the card is the agent, and it may 

 be said, the laboring agent, of bringing order out of disorder, and 

 of giving form to confused matter. 



In all operating machines, there are parts which are denominated 

 the working or wearing points in such machines, and in the series of 

 machines by which cloth is fabricated and made, the card answers to 

 this appellation; the extreme fineness of the wire of which they are 

 composed, and the great labor which they perform, tends to their 

 rapid and inevitable destruction; and on this account the advantages 

 of an expeditious means of their reproduction is apparent^ 



In the commencement of cloth making by machinery in this coun- 

 try, the manufacture of cards was by hand labor, aided by two ma- 

 chines; one to prick the leather, and the other to cut and bend the 

 wire for the teeth; after which, the same were set into the leather 

 one by one, by the hand. 



This was especially the state in which the manufacture of cards in 

 the years from ISIO to 1813 was found, when the setting of card 

 teeth furnished employment for thousands of women and children in 

 Massachusetts, Connecticut, New-Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode^ 



