TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 159 
these few years in the process of combing, which was now performed by machinery 
instead of by hand, and the cost of the process reduced almost to nothing,—in part to 
the greater simplicity of the other processes, admitting of their being carried on almost 
entirely in large factories,—but more than all to the introduction of cotton warps into 
the manufacture, which had not only cheapened the raw material, but had introduced 
a vast variety of new descriptions of goods, light, beautiful, cheap, and adapted both 
for dress and furniture. According to the last Factory Return made by the Factory 
Inspectors in 1856, and printed by the House of Commons in 1857, there were in 
Yorkshire 445 worsted factories and 806 woollen factories; but the number of opera- 
tives was 78,994 in the former, and only 42,982 in the latter. The average number 
of operatives in the worsted factories, therefore, was 177, whilst in the woollen facto- 
ries it was only 53. The whole number of operatives returned in the census of 1851, 
as employed in these two manufactures in the county of York, was 97,147 in the 
worsted manufacture, and 81,128 in the woollen. Four-fifths of all the hands em- 
ployed in the worsted trade were in factories, whilst only about half of those in the 
woollen trade were in factories. Everything tended to show that the worsted ma- 
nufacture, like those of cotton and linen, had become an employment carried on 
by the machinery of large factories; and as mechanical improvements were con- 
stantly speeding the power-loom and the spindle, so that in worsted factories the 
power-loom had increased 67 per cent. in speed within the last fen years, and the 
spindle 114 per cent., manufactures thus situated must advance more rapidiy than 
those which, like the woollen, were more dependent on manual labour. The woollen 
manufacture was surpassed in extent by the cotton manufacture at the beginning of 
the present century. It still held the second place in regard to the number of opera- 
tives employed, though not to the number employed in factories, in which it was sur- 
passed both by the worsted and the flax or linen trades. In the woollen mills, between 
1838 and 1856, the number of operatives increased 44 per cent., the horse-power 
employed increased 25 per cent., and the number of power-looms increased 572 per 
cent.; but still the other manufactures advanced with greater strides in almost all 
these respects. The author next referred te the sources from which the raw material, 
sheep’s wool, is drawn, and to the remarkable changes which the present century has 
witnessed with regard to it. The wool was English, foreign, and colonial, and came 
from all quarters of the globe. Our largest supply was from the United Kingdom, 
but nearly half of the domestic wools was consumed in the worsted manufacture, and 
the other half was used for the lower kinds of woollen goods. Within living memory 
Yorkshire cloth was made exclusively of English wool, though Spanish wool had lon 
been used for the finer cloths of the West of England. Now, however, English wool, 
from its comparative coarseness, was entirely disused in the making of broad-cloth. 
In the last half of the 18th century the import of foreign wool fluctuated from a little 
under to a little over two million pounds weight a year. In 1799 it was 2,263,666 lbs. 
But in the year 1857 the quantity of foreign and colonial wool imported was 127,390,885 
Ibs., of which 90,903,666 lbs. was retained for home consumption. As the exports of 
woollen goods did not increase in any proportion whatever to these figures, it was 
evident that the character of the cloth, both that worn at home and that exported, 
must have changed by the substitution of foreign and colonial for English wool. The 
foreign wool first used when this improvement in the quality of the cloth began, was 
that of Spain, the native country of the merino sheep. The total import of wool 
sprang up suddenly from 2,263,666 lbs. in the year 1799, to 8,609,368 Ibs. in 1800; 
and of the latter quantity, 6,062,824 lbs., or more than two-thirds, was Spanish. After 
the French invasion of Spain and the long Peninsular wars, the quality of Spanish 
wool degenerated, and the quantity fell off; and its place in our manufacture was 
graduaily filled by the wool of Saxony and Silesia, into which country the merino 
breed of sheep had been introduced in 1765. The German wool was still by much 
the finest used in any country; but as the merino flocks were introduced by Mr. 
Maearthur into our great Australian colonies, and were found toincrease there immensely 
without any very great degeneracy in the quality of the fleece, German wool had in 
its turn to a very considerable extent been superseded by Australian. The following 
Table showed the imports and exports of foreign and colonial wool, at intervals of 
about ten years, for the last century :-— 
