GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. 



189 



terest. The first (Fig. 17) is also from Wangen, and, to use 

 tlie description accompanyiag the sketches he has kindly given 

 me, ''the warp consists of strands of 

 un-twisted fibre (hemp ?) bound to- 

 gether at intervals of about an inch 

 apart by nearly similar strands ' wat- 

 tled in ' among them." The next 

 specimen (Fig. 18), from Nieder Wyl, 

 shows a great advance, for " the warp 

 consists of twisted string, and the woof 

 of a finer thread also twisted." The 

 third specimen is a piece of ordinary 

 plain weaving. Now all these things, 

 European, Polynesian, and American, 

 seem to be in their natural and rea- 

 sonable places in a progress upward, 

 but it is hard to imagine a people, 

 under any combination of circum- 

 stances, dropping down from the art 

 of weaving, to adopt a more tedious 

 and less profitable way of working up 

 the fibre which it had cost them so 

 much trouble to prepare ; knowing 

 the better art, and deliberately devoting their material and 

 time to practising the worse. So it is a 

 very reasonable and natural thing, that 

 tribes who had been used to twist their 

 thread by hand, should sometimes over- 

 come their dislike to change, and adopt 

 the spindle when they saw it in use ; or 

 such a tribe might be supposed capable 

 of inventing it ; but the going back from 

 the spindle to hand-twisting is a thing 

 scarcely conceivable. A spindle is made 

 too easily by any one who has once caught 

 the idea of it ; a stick and a bit of some- 

 thing heavy for a whorl is the whole machine. Not many 

 months ago, an old lady was seen in the isle of Islay, comfort- 



Fig. 17. 



Fig. 18. 



