808 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
This meeting was attended by about sixty-five of the Superintendents of 
State Boards of Education, Public Schools, Boards and Principals of Seminaries, 
etc., from all portions of the United States. 
Papers upon appropriate subjects were read by Prof. S. A. Butterfield, 
President Gilman, of Johns Hopkins Union; Hon. C. D. Randall, W. T. Har- 
ris, LL. D., and several others, besides discussions of kindred topics, in 
which most of the members joined. 
These circulars contain valuable matter for teachers at all times, and this 
particular nuniber is especially rich in useful and entertaining articles and 
suggestions. 
SOIMaIN WIE WC MOS Cle ILVAIN XC. 
MANUFACTURE OF LINEN. 
Although the natural appearance of wool might first have suggested its use 
as a textile and woven material, there is no historic evidence that woolen cloth 
antedated that of linen. The manufacture of linen dates from the earliest written 
records. It was well known in the time of Herodotus, and the Egyptian 
mummies are swathed in linen cloth. With the Egyptians, linen appears to have 
borne a sacred character, as their priests were forbidden to enter the temples 
clothed in other than linen garments and their dead were always shrouded in it. 
In later times linen cloth appears to have been a manufacture very generally 
practiced among civilized peoples. 
Probably because of the superior facility with which cotton fiber can be pre- 
pared for spinning and weaving,the manufacture of linen in this country does not 
seem to have attained the proportions to which its actual value entitles it. The 
extensive application of machinery to the manufacture of linen is of a compara- 
tively recent date, and even now much of the Irish linen is of hand make, from 
the pulling of the flax to the finish of the cloth. Massachusetts appears to have 
led in the linen manufacture in this country. Previons to 1640 the people of this 
colony imported from England most of their clothing and all of the finer sort; 
but in that year the Assembly decreed that : 
‘¢The Court taking into serious Consideration the absolute Necessity for the 
Raising of the Manufacture of Linnen cloths, doth declare that it is the Intent of 
this Court that there shall be an Order settled about it, and therefore doth require 
the Magistrates and Deputies of the several Towns to acquaint the townsmen 
therewith, and to make Enquiry what seed is in every town, what Men and 
Wimmen are skillful in the braking, spinning and weaving, what means for the 
providing of Wheels ; and to consider with those skillful in that manufacture, and 
what course may be taken for teaching the boys and girls in all towns the spinning 
