The transition from vegetable fibre to the use of animal staples, such as wool and hair, could not have been very difficult; indeed, as already stated, it took place at a period of which we possess no very authentic written record.
The instrument used for spinning in all countries, from the earliest times, was the distaff and spindle. This simple apparatus was put by the Greek mythologists into the hands of Minerva and the Parcæ; Solomon employs upon it the industry of the virtuous woman; to the present day the distaff is used in India, Egypt, and other eastern countries.
The ancient spindle or distaff was a very simple instrument. The late Lady Calcott informs us, that it continued even to our own days to be used by the Hindoos in all its primitive simplicity. "I have seen," she says, "the rock or distaff formed simply of the leading shoot of some young tree, carefully peeled, it might be birch or elder, and, further north, of fir or pine; and the spindle formed of the beautiful shrub Euonymus, or spindle-tree."[1]
Spinning among the Egyptians, as among our ancestors of no very distant age, was a domestic occupation in which ladies of rank did not hesitate to engage. The term "spinster" is yet applied to unmarried ladies of every rank, and there are persons yet alive who remember to have seen the spinning wheel an ordinary piece of furniture in domestic economy.
We are told that "Solomon had horses brought out of Egypt
- ↑ The superior fineness of some Indian muslins, and their quality of retaining, longer than European fabrics, an appearance of excellence, has occasioned a belief that the cotton wool of which they are woven is superior to any known else-*where; this, however, is so far from being the fact, that no cotton is to be found in India which at all equals in quality the better kinds produced in the United States of America. The excellence of India muslins must be wholly ascribed to the skilfulness and patience of the workmen, as shown in the different processes of spinning and weaving. (See Plate v.) Their yarn is spun upon the distaff, and it is owing to the dexterous use of the finger and thumb in forming the thread, and to the moisture which it thus imbibes, that its fibres are more perfectly incorporated than they can be through the employment of any mechanical substitutes.
