Nor must the other parts of the United Kingdom be forgotten. Cotton weaving extends no further into Yorkshire than Todmorden, and about 2,000,000 spinning and doubling spindles are in use about Halifax, Brighouse, Sowerby Bridge and district, these being employed on yarns for dress fabrics made of a mixture of cotton and worsted, as well as for curtains and hosiery in the Nottingham and Leicester districts. In Scotland, the cotton trade is confined to the counties of Lanark, Renfrew and Ayr. The spinning trade is here going down rapidly, there only being about one third the number of spinning spindles running this year (1888), as compared with 1857. The doubling spindles are on the increase, especially for the Paisley thread trade. The weaving department is also increasing, there being in the three counties 28,853 looms as compared with 20,963 in 1856. The superior classes of cloth are made for the home trade—fine reeds, fine muslin, plain and figured, and the manufacture of Turkey reds is also extensive. In Ireland there are three cotton-spinning firms, three cotton-weaving firms, and one both spinning and weaving, with a total of 70,900 spindles, and 2501 power looms.
Summarising the different classes of work into which the industry is divided, we may allot to the coarse plain trade the Rossendale Valley and Rochdale, locating the medium plain trade in Blackburn, Burnley and Darwen, with the finest plain goods in Accrington and Preston, the light fancy trade in Preston, Chorley, and Ashton, and the heavy fancy in Bolton and Bury.
Cotton.
Even in a manual treating of the weaving processes it is not foreign to refer succinctly to the cotton and the treatment it has undergone to fit it for use in a weaving shed. The manufacturer who has had experience in a spinning mill often finds the knowledge acquired there to stand him in good stead in the selection and use of the yarn. Our chief supplies of cotton are drawn from the United States of North America; next in importance, although far removed in quantity from the first-named, is East India, then Egypt, and lastly Brazil. Cotton is a fibrous vegetable substance, being the fruit of the cotton plant, a shrub of the Malvaceæ, genus Gossypium. There are several varieties of this plant, but the development of the raw material is the same in each. The plant attains its full height about June (this being about two months subsequent to sowing), and the bolls or seed pods are found to be ripening about the middle of July. These bolls, about 1in. diameter, are divided by membranous walls into three parts, containing three or four seeds each, covered with the thin transparent cylindrical fibres attached by one end to the seed.
As the fruit approaches maturity, these fibres lose their cylindrical form, becoming ribbon-shaped through the collapse of their walls, and at the same time each fibre twists on its axis, thus causing a sufficient pressure on the interior of the boll to burst it at the junction of the compartments in the outer casing.
FIG. 1.