SHEEP AND WOOL. 
407 
garments with hair that we can with wool. If you put a 
piece of human hair under the microscope, you see that the 
exterior is composed of scales which overlap each other so as 
to present an imbricated appearance. Now if you put wool 
under the microscope you will see that the exterior presents 
a serrated appearance, which is much more developed in 
some wools than in others. It is only after long boiling and 
treatment with sulphuric acid that you can get human hair 
to look in the same way with the scales all spread. Now it 
is dependent upon these woolly hairs possessing looser scales 
that they are of use in the arts. That the use of wool de¬ 
pends upon those imbrications is seen in the kinds of wool 
more extensively employed in the manufacture of cloth. 
There are several calculations of these serratures. Mr. Goss 
finds that the finest Saxony wool contains 2720 in a single 
inch. Now that Saxony w 7 ool is used for making superfine 
cloth, and it is a kind of wool that we never get from English 
sheep. Some merino wool presented to Mr. Goss showed 
2400 serrations to the inch. Now we come to our own 
Southdown fleeces, which are known by manufacturers to be 
inferior to the Saxony wool, and Mr. Goss found in South- 
down wool 2080 serrations to the inch. Next we come to 
our Leicester wool, which is still less valuable, and in this 
we find only 1850 of these serrations. Now that calculation 
has but recently been made, but it proves that those serrations 
have some relation to their use in the manufactures; and now 
that that is made out the manufacturer will know how to 
detect the quality of the w ool by the use of the microscope. 
It is all very well for men to say “we can use our hands and 
our eyes as w r e have done from the time of Adam, and w T e 
do not w r ant any of your new-fangled instruments but 
that is like a man rejecting the use of one of his eyes because 
his grandfather had only one eye. By the use of the micro¬ 
scope we can detect qualities in the w 7 ool hitherto unknow'n 
even to the practical man. These serratures then are of 
great importance in the history, and indeed in the manufac¬ 
ture of w T ool, and it would appear that that process which is 
called felting, depends entirely on those little serratures be¬ 
coming entangled one in another, and thus a piece of cloth 
is made without weaving. You cannot too early know the 
distinction between the uses of the different kinds of w r ool. 
One kind is converted into what we call cloth by the felting 
process, and another is converted into what w 7 e call worsted, 
or stuff, or stockings. These are made from the hair which 
does not felt well, and we find that it is just in proportion to 
the number of these serratures that the cloth will felt w r ell. 
