PREPARATION OF FIBRE AND OF CORDAGE. 19 
to favour their shooting upwards, and to prevent their too great 
exposure to heat, light, and air, which favour the formation 
of the different secretions of the plant and the consequent 
hardening of the woody fibre. 
PREPARATION OF FIBRE AND OF CORDAGE. 
This woody or fibrous tissue, formed as it is by the junction, 
end to end, of elongated cells, is, when in its natural state in 
the living plant, adherent to the membranous sides of the cel- 
lular tissue, and surrounded with mucilaginous, resinous, or 
other vegetable secretions. It must, necessarily, be separated 
from all these before it can be applied to any economical purpose. 
This separation of the fibre from the rest of the vegetable 
matter is effected, either by stripping the bark from trees, or 
taking fibre-yielding leaves, and pounding them between stones 
and subsequently washing; or simply picking the fibres by 
hand, and thus separating them from the rest of the vegetable 
mass. But it is more usual, and also more expeditious, to 
separate the fibres by previous maceration in water. Fermen- 
tation then takes place, much of*the vegetable tissue becomes 
destroyed, the fibres loosened, and then easily separated 
by washing or beating. Various attempts have also been 
made to separate the fibres by mechanical means. These, as 
well as the other methods suited to different plants, will be 
described under their respective heads, but more especially in 
the section which treats of Flax, as that plant and its fibre has 
had much attention devoted to it. 
But fibres, when thus separated for economical purposes, 
are rather bundles of fibres than in the separated state of the 
ultimate fibre. Sometimes the commercial fibre, or some 
portion of it, is in the state, as stripped from the stems, of 
narrow flat ribbons, and therefore with sharp edges. Hence 
the necessity of passing them between rollers, or of submitting 
them to a rough process of combing, called heckling. Thus, 
not only impurities are got rid of, but the fibres are divided, 
laid parallel, and the short ones separated, constituting codilla 
or tow. 
The longest of these fibres being usually not more than 
from three to four feet in length, are obviously too short for 
