still sold in Paris at from 3500 to 2500 francs each, and even 50,000 francs have been paid for one shawl. It became necessary, therefore, either to rest satisfied with work which should have merely a surface appearance, or contrive economical methods of weaving, to produce the real Cashmere style with much less labour. By the aid of the draw loom, and still better, the Jacquard loom, M. Ternaux first succeeded in weaving Cashmere shawls perfectly similar to the Oriental in external aspect, which became fashionable under the name of French Cashmere. But to produce shawls altogether identical on both sides, with the Eastern, was a more difficult task, which was accomplished only at a later period by M. Bauson of Paris.

In both modes of manufacture, the piece is mounted by drawing the warp through the harness and ground headles, as is commonly practised for warps in the Jacquard loom. The weaving of imitation shawls is executed as usual by as many shuttles as there are colours in the design or pattern, and which are thrown across the warp, in the order established by the design. The greater number of these weft yarns being introduced only at intervals into the web when the composition of the pattern requires it, they remain floating loose at the back of the piece and are cut afterwards without affecting in the least the quality of the texture, but there is a considerable waste of yarn in the weaving, which is worked up into carpets.

The weaving of the imitation of real Cashmere shawls is different from the above. The yarns intended to be for the weft are not only equal in number to the colours of the pattern to be imitated, but besides this, as many little shuttles, (like those used by embroiderers and lace manufacturers. See Figs. 135 and 136,) are filled with these yarns as there are to be colours repeated in the breadth of the piece, which renders their number considerable when the pattern is somewhat complicated and loaded with colours; each of these small bobbins or shuttles passes through only that portion of the flower or pattern in which the colour of its yarn is to appear, and stops at the one side and the other of the cloth, alternately, exactly at its limit; it then returns upon itself after having crossed the thread of the adjoining shuttle: from this reciprocal intertexture of all the yarns of the shuttles, it results, that although the weft is composed of a great many different threads they no less constitute a continuous line in the whole breadth of the web upon which the lay or batten acts in the ordinary way.

We see, therefore, that the whole art of manufacturing this

Cashmere cloth consists, in avoiding the confusion of the shuttles, and in not striking up the lay till all have fulfilled their function. The labour does not exceed the strength of a woman, even though she has to direct the loon and work the treadles: seated on her bench at the end opposite to the middle of the beam, she has for aids, in weaving shawls from 45 to 52 inches wide, two girl apprentices, whom she directs and instructs in their tasks. About four hundred day's work are required for a Cashmere shawl of that breadth.

In the Oriental process all the figures in relief are made simply with a slender pirn, without the shuttle used in European weaving. By the Indians, the flower and its ground are made with the pirn by means of an intertwisting which renders them, in some measure, independent of the warp.

Considered in reference to their materials, the French shawls present three distinct classes, which characterize the three fabrics of Paris, Lyons, and Nimes. Paris manufactures the French Cashmere, so called, of which both the warp and the weft are the yarn of pure Cashmere down; this web represents with fidelity, the figures and the shades of colour of the Cashmere shawl which it copies the deception would be complete if the reverse of the piece did not show the cut ends, as in common shawl weaving. The warp of the imitation Hindoo shawl, also, woven at Paris, is composed of spun silk, which reduces its price without much impairing its beauty.

Lyons, however, has made the greatest progress in the manufacture of shawls; it excels particularly in the texture of its Thibet shawls, the weft of which is a mixture of wool and spun silk.

Nimes is remarkable for the low price of its shawls, in which, spun silk, Thibet down, and cotton are all worked up together.

It appears that M. L. Girad, at Livres, near Paris, has succeeded best in imitating Cashmere shawls, exhibiting all the variety of design and colouring, which appears in the Oriental.

The shawl merchants of India admire the ingenuity of the French artists in imitating Cashmere shawls, but condemn the cloth on account of its harshness, which may consist in a difference in the twisting of the yarn. In the shawl country, there are three coloured wools, white, light brown, and dark brown, the two last are from Thibet, the other from Bholkera; the light brown will receive four colours, viz., black, blue, green and brown; the dark brown will receive only black, brown and blue. The shawl merchants state, that the colours in the English shawls are fugitive

The colours now used do not exceed fifty in the most elaborate productions of the Cashmere loom. Formerly it was said that three hundred shades of colour were used.

The embroidery is not worked with the needle but woven in the cloth. The patterns are read off from a book, and not from a drawing. There is an embroidery language, by which the colours, number, division, and distribution and manipulations of the threads, and the forms and sizes of the flowers, foliage, &c., are symbolically designated. The looseness of twist in the web is owing to being done by the hand; these objections, however, have all lately been remedied by the ingenuity of the French artists, and particularly Messrs. Polino Brothers, of Paris.

SECTION EIGHTH.

LACE MANUFACTURE.

The history of the arts furnishes no instance of such remarkable changes in the wages of labour, and no such instructive lessons of the influence of mechanical improvements, as that afforded by the manufacture of bobbin-net lace. For some time after its commencement, in Nottingham, in the year 1809, it was common for an artizan to abandon his usual occupation and betake himself to a lace frame, in which he became a share holder, and realize by working upon it, from 20s. to 40s. per day. In consequence of such enormous earnings, Nottingham, with Loughborough, and the neighbouring villages, very soon became the theatre of an epidemic mania, unequalled in modern times. Many unfortunate individuals, although destitute of mechanical genius or even talent of any kind, tormented themselves both day and night with schemes of bobbins, pushers, lockers, point-bars, and needles of every variety of shape imaginable, till their minds got permanently bewildered. Indeed, several lost entirely what little sense they once possessed; and

* For an account of the lace and net-work manufactures in ancient days, the reader is referred to page 5, and from page 41 to 57.

others after cherishing visions of the most unbounded wealth, as in the dreamy age of alchemy, finding their projects abortive, sunk into the lowest depths of despair, and committed suicide, by blowing out their brains?

Bobbin-net lace is a light semi-transparent texture of fine cotton thread, arranged in hexagonal meshes. This species of cloth or web is produced by means of a warp, the same as in plain weaving, except that the threads are further apart. A specimen of this texture is represented at Fig. 132.

The weft or filling, however is applied in quite a different way from that of plain cloth: it consists, in the first place, of an equal number of threads with the warp; and these weft threads are made to revolve round every two threads of the warp, which changes the relative positions of the warp threads. Second.-Among all the pairs of the warp-threads which have been thus twined together by weftthread, one of them is shifted to the neighbouring warp-thread upon the left, and connected to it by the convolution of the weft thread; after which, the shifted warp-threads change back to their first position, where they are again entwined or laced together by the weft thread, as before; and the other threads of these pairs shift to the right and are entwined or laced together in the same manner as the first or left hand set were. Third.-While this maneuvering in the positions of the warp threads is in progress, the weft threads which entwine or lace them together, also inove to one side, and after the warp threads have been laced or entwined twelve times

with a weft-thread, the latter moves sideways through one interval of the warp-thread, and, if it were coloured, would produce, in the course of fabricating the cloth, a diagonal line across it. The manufacture of lace, therefore, differs from plain weaving, in this, that the threads of the warp are not alternately raised and depressed, for the purpose of introducing the weft, but are shifted laterally to the next pair, to which they become united by the weft-threads, working likewise in pairs, each of them entwining two individual threads at once, as in the manner above explained.

Fig.133

Fig. 133 will give the reader a more correct idea of the nature or mode of manufacturing this species of texture, by the crossing or twining of the warp and weft-threads together. This specimen shows, upon a magnified or enlarged scale, how the fabric is produced from the conjunction of three threads; one of which proceeds from the top, downwards, in a winding or wave line (constituting Hogarth's line of beauty;) the second of these threads runs towards the right, and the third to the left, crossing each other obliquely in the centre between each two meshes throughout the series, as shown in the Fig. The warp-threads, as before stated, are placed perpendicularly in the machine, and derive their curvature from the tension of the obliquely disposed weft-threads, by which they are alternately drawn to the right and to the left.

The weft-threads which are to pass through the intervals of the warp, in order to interlace or entwine two threads of the latter together, are wound upon little bobbins; one of which is represented, one fourth its real size, at Fig. 136. where both an edge and a side