1887. ] MICROSCOPICAL JOURNAL. 187 
crank with her left hand she uses her right to keep the cocoons in action. 
Occasionally one of the six minute filaments will break. She sees it in- 
stantly. The reel stops, a thread from another cocoon is caught and dex- 
terously attached, when the work goes on. The operations will be fully 
illustrated in the National Museum, a complete set of the apparatus used 
having been secured—all but the girl. 
The ordinary product of the Japanese hand-loom is quite inferior to the 
factory or filature silk, which, being reeled by machinery run by water or 
steam power, under the careful superintendence of experienced men, is more 
even and perfect. In the filatures a single operator produces from 60 to So 
momme of reeled silk in one day. The highest rate of wages there paid is 
about 15 cents per day, and this is for Seed female labor. 
The microscopist will now understand the complex structure of a silk 
thread such as is used in weaving. First we have the five or six exceedingly 
fine filaments which run together and become immediately united to form the 
single thread of reeled or raw silk, then come the several operations of 
doubling and twisting to make the thread used in weaving, and the still 
coarser thread for sewing. It will be of interest to remember that five 
cocoons run into one thread together made a thread 3,280 feet in length. 
This is the length of silk spun by a single worm in making its cocoon. 
One of the last excursions made before leaving Osaka was to a celebrated 
tea producing district known as Uji, where some of the best Japanese tea is 
grown. Uji is not far from Kioto, from which city our party started in 
Juirikishas early one morning in June. The best tea of the season had been 
picked, but the second crop was coming on, and it was our purpose to ob- 
serve all the operations of picking and firing as conducted by the Japanese. 
It may not be generally known that the tea prepared by the Japanese, and 
universally used by them, has to be redried, and otherwise treated, before it 
can be sent abroad. 
The leaves are picked from the tops of plants, which may be fifty, or, per- 
haps, a hundred years old; only the tender, green tufts being used. These 
are carried in large baskets to the firing place, where they are first steamed 
for a moment, and immediately carried to the firing trays. These are made 
of paper, about four feet long by three in width, and five inches deep, set 
over a smouldering fire of straw. About five pounds of green leaves are » 
worked in one tray. The workman, having no regard to the prevailing ideas 
of propriety in the West, wears only such clothing as the present laws of 
Japan require (and that is not much), and for half an hour he stirs and 
brushes about and rolls the leaves with his hands, and gets about 12 cents a 
day for it. 
The leaves having thus become heated through, quite limp, and somewhat 
dried, are then given to another man, who manipulates them in the same 
way, but as this man is paid 4o cents per day it is clear that there must be 
some peculiar knack about the work, for that is high wages in Japan. This 
man works one hour, and the leaves are then dry, neatly twisted, and ready 
to be cleaned and sent to market. 
The operations of the manufacture I have watched in detail, and therefore 
I know whereof I speak. The particulars are of no consequence here, as the 
brief outline above given will suffice for what the microscopist needs to know. 
But it is proper to say that in getting verbal accounts of the operations from 
men engaged in the business (not the firers or laborers), I was given such 
confusing and contradictory statements that I was forced to discard them en- 
tirely. For example, the first story was that the tea was fired in four suc- 
cessive trays by as many different men. Then it was four trays and one man. 
Then somebody else said three men, with a well-graded scale of wages. The 
