Properties in Clothing.
The skin just taken from a sheep, the hide when removed from an ox, are both as flexible as in life. But they soon stiffen so as to be uncomfortable when worn as garments. Wetting the pelt is but a transient resource; satisfactory, because lasting, is the effect of rubbing grease, fat, or oil into the texture of the hide. Peary in Greenland found that pelts in small pieces, and bird-skins, were softened by the Eskimo women chewing them for hours together.
Wetting was as notable an aid to handicraft of old as today. Boughs, roots, withes, osiers, or the stems of fibrous plants, when thoroughly saturated with water became so soft as to be easily worked, yielding strands, as in the case of hemp, separated from worthless pulp. Hence the basketmaker, the wattler, the builder, the potter, the weaver of rude nets and traps, long ago learned to wet their materials to make them plastic. Take now the reverse process of drying, which toughens wood, and the sinews used as primitive thread. Leaves when dried become hard and brittle of texture, hence the necessity that when woven and interlaced as roofs the work shall promptly follow upon gathering the material. In plaiting coarse mats and sails may have begun the textile art which to-day gives us the linens of Belfast, the silks of Lyons and Milan.