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danorer of beino- " frozen out." The first is Fuller's Teazle, 

 believed to be only a luxuriant variety of our common 

 wild Teazle, from which it mainly differs in having 

 hooked, instead of straight floral bracts, a peculiarity 

 which — with other minor ones — is supposed to have been 

 acquired by cultivation, as it demands a richly manured 

 soil to preserve its characters. A small difference, 

 apparently, those minute hooked bristles — but an all- 

 important one — because in them the economic value of 

 the plant resides, as being indispensable to manufacturers 

 all over the world for the purpose of producing the nap 

 on cloth, no machinery, however delicate, having yet 

 been invented which will effect that process nearly as 

 well. To give some idea of the magnitude of the Teazle 

 industiy, I may mention that in the middle of the 

 nineteenth century, the enormous number of nineteen 

 millions of Teazle-heads were being imported into this 

 country at a cost of five shillings a thousand, from France, 

 and more no doubt at the present day. Why, then, it 

 may naturally occur to us, do we not grow our own 

 Teazles ? but as the question would lead at once into the 

 bristly brakes of Tariff Reform which we have nothing 

 to do with here, I cannot venture to consider it. The 

 other instance is that of the plant Isatis tinctoria, 

 Dyei's' Woad, which is still used by dyers for dyeing cloth, 

 or wools for the best sort of cloth. Although the Woad 

 industry, wherever carried on, is a very ancient one, it 

 has for long been almost entirely superseded by East 

 Indian Indigo, Indigofera tinctoria ; nevertheless the 

 superior virtues of Woad in imparting a permanent, 

 reliable, weather-resisting blue dye — a " fast " colour — 

 are so well established, that the expression " woaded cloth " 

 has come to mean any sort of high-class fast-dyed cloth. 

 That being so, how is it that Woad has given place to 

 Indigo ? Because the method of getting blue out of the 

 Indigo plant is so much easier, less elaborate and less 

 costly — than in the case of Woad. Indigo, as a blue dye. 



