lower counts of yarns. The flier-spindle has a rotary motion. In cap-spinning (see illustration) the spindle and the cap are the stationary parts. A tube or shell, which receives the bobbin, is placed on the spindle, and its motion distributes the yarn upon 
Fig. 18.—Cap-spindle.Fig. 19—Ring-spindle. the spindle. Cap-spinning is chiefly utilized in the finer counts of yarn, as there is no limit to the speed at which the bobbins may be made to revolve. In ring-spinning which is more common in the cotton manufacture, the spindles revolve, and the bobbins are so attached as to revolve with them, thus imparting their own twist. The ring-frame is more largely used in the worsted-yarn manufacture for doubling, or making twofold yarns, than for spinning.
It may now be easier for the reader to fully comprehend the difference between a woolen and a worsted thread—made from the same wool in many instances, but so differently treated in manipulation that they seem almost as fundamentally unlike as a woolen and a cotton thread. Worsted has received a treatment similar in many respects to that by which a cotton thread is made. We have seen that the worsted manufacture is a series of processes continuously following each other, and that the woolen manufacture is a compound process intermittently carried on. The woolen sliver, after leaving the carding machine, is wound at once upon bobbins attached to the mule. In this machine the spindles have a compound motion, simultaneously in progress, whereby the sliver is drawn and wound. This operation completes the woolen thread. This yarn requires very different treatment, both in the weave and the finish, from the worsted yarn. The latter is distinguished by a compact weave, ready at
an even distribution of the yarn. But the use of the flier was not known in England before the end of the seventeenth century. In a pamphlet printed in 1681, by Thomas Firmin, there is an illustration of an improved wheel, with two spindles, provided with fliers, having on them hooks or pins for directing the yarn on different parts of the bobbin.—Encyclopædia Britannica.
