maiden could spin twelve skeins of thread in ten hours, producing a thread a little more than three miles in length, while the length of her walk to and fro was about five miles. Now one Penelope can attend to six or eight hundred spindles, each of which spins five thousand yards of thread a day, or, with the eight hundred spindles, four million yards, or nearly twenty-one hundred miles of thread in a day, while she need not walk at all.

It was when the weaver threw the shuttle through the warp by hand that Job's exclamation, "My days are like a weaver's shuttle" was an appropriate text on the brevity of human life. It may be just as appropriate now, but far more striking, when it is realised that machines now throw the shuttle one hundred and eighty times a minute, or three times a second. Flying as fast as it does, when the shuttle becomes exhausted of yarn a late invention presents a new bobbin and a new supply of yarn to the shuttle without stopping the machine.

As to knitting, this century has seen the day pass when all hosiery was knit by hand. First, machines were invented for knitting the leg or the foot of the stocking, which were then joined by hand, and then came machines that made the stocking complete. The social industry so quietly but slowly followed by the good women in their chimney corners with their knitting needles, by which a woman might possibly knit a pair a day, was succeeded a quarter of a century ago by machines, twelve of which could be attended to by a boy, which would knit and complete five thousand pairs a week. Such a machine commences with the stocking at the top, knits down, widening and narrowing, changes the stitch as it goes on to the heel, shapes the heel, and finishes at the end

of the toe, all one thread, and then it recommences the operation and goes on with another and another. Fancy stockings, with numerous colours blended, are so knit, and if the yarn holds out a mile of stockings may be thus knit, without a break and without an attendant. By these machines the astounding result was reached of making the stockings at the cost of one-sixth of a mill per pair.

The wonderful reduction in the cost of all kinds of textile fabrics due to the perfection of spinning and loom mechanisms, and its power to meet the resulting enormous increase in demand, has enabled the poor of to-day to be clad better and with a far greater variety of apparel than it was possible for the rich a hundred years ago; and the increased consumption and demand have brought into these fields of labour, and into other fields of labour created by these, great armies of men and women, notwithstanding the labour-saving devices.

The wants of the world can no longer be supplied by skilled hand labour. And it is better that machines do the skilled labour, if the product is increased while made better and cheaper, and the number of labourers in the end increased by the development and demands of the art.

Among the recent devices is one which dispenses with the expensive and skillful work by hand of drawing the warp threads into the eyes of the heddles and through the reed of the loom.

Cane-backed and bottomed chairs and lounges only a few years ago were a luxury of the rich and made slowly by hand. Now the open mesh cane fabric, having diagonal strands, and other varieties, are made rapidly by machinery. Turkish carpets are woven, and floors the world over are carpeted with

those rich materials the sight of which would have astonished the ordinary beholder a half century ago. Matting is woven; wire, cane, straw, spun glass; in fact, everything that can be woven by hand into useful articles now finds its especially constructed machine for weaving it.

CHAPTER XIX.

GARMENTS.

"MAN is a tool-using animal. Weak in himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his legs lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use tools, can devise tools; with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron as if it were paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all. . . . Man is a tool-using animal, of which truth, clothes are but one example."-Sartor Resartus.

In looking through the records of man's achievements to find the beginnings of inventions, we discover the glimmering of a change in the form of the immemorial needle, in an English patent granted to Charles F. Weisenthal, June 24, 1775. It was a needle with a centrally located eye, and with both ends pointed, designed for embroidery work by hand, and the object of the two points was to prevent the turning of the needle end for end after its passage through the cloth. But it was not until this century

that the idea was reduced to practice in sewing machines.

To Thomas Saint, a cabinet maker by trade, of Greenhills Rents, in the Parish of St. Sepulchre, Middlesex County, England, the world is indebted for the first clear conception of a sewing machine. Saint's attention was attracted to the slow way of sewing boots and shoes and other leather work, so he determined to improve the method. He took out a patent September 17, 1790, and although the germs of some of the leading parts of the modern sewing machine are there described, it does not appear that his patent was applied to practice. In fact, it slumbered in the archives of the British patent office for two generations, and after the leading sewing machines of this century had been invented and introduced, before it was rediscovered, and its contents appreciated in the light of more recent developments. Probably Saint's machine, if constructed in accordance with his plans, would not have done much good work, certainly not with woven cloth, as he proposed to employ a hooked needle to carry a loop through the material, which would have been snarled by the cloth threads; but from his drawings and description it is clearly established that he was first to conceive of a vertically reciprocating needle for forming a seam from a continuous thread drawn from a spool; a seam in which each loop is locked, or enchained with a subsequent loop, to form what is known as the chain, or single thread stitch; and a horizontal sliding plate, to support the material to be sewed, and by which the material was also moved sideways after each stitch.

May 30, 1804, John Duncan received an English patent for "tamboring on cloth." He proposed to em