which was not their own; they only contended that their piracy was not legally punishable. It is asserted, indeed, that some of the persons against whom the first actions were brought in 1781 had intended, if the cases had been tried, to maintain that Arkwright himself had stolen the invention; it has been averred that two witnesses who were ready to swear this, one of them having been brought over from Ireland for the purpose, were actually in court during the trial of the action against Mordaunt, but, at any rate, it is certain that neither of them was produced either on that occasion or four afterwards, when the next trial took place.

years

19. The two witnesses, however, were still extant. And, having now failed in their other plea, the parties interested in the destruction of the patent, at last, as if in desperation, determined to venture upon bringing them forward. With this view a writ of scire facias for the repeal of the patent was taken out, and the case came on for trial in the Court of King's Bench in June, 1785. The insufficiency of the specification was again alleged; but in addition, it was now charged that the author of the invention was not Arkwright, but a poor reed-maker named Highs or Hayes, who in 1767, while living in the town of Leigh, had applied to Kay, the watchmaker, already mentioned, who was then resident in the same place, and was his neighbour and acquaintance, to make him a model of a spinning-apparatus upon the principle of the double pair of rollers. The secret, it was affirmed, was communicated to Arkwright by Kay when they became acquainted shortly afterwards at Warrington. This story was supported by the evidence both of Kay and of Highs (it was the latter who had been brought over from Ireland in 1781), and also by that of Kay's wife, who, however, only professed to recollect her husband making models of some kind or other first for Highs and then for Arkwright.

20. It was obviously impossible that evidence such as this could be met at the moment by any direct confutation. It could only be resisted on the ground of its in

herent improbability. It related to transactions that had taken place seventeen or eighteen years before. For all that long time the witnesses had been silent, notwithstanding that the subject of Arkwright's patent had been so much before the public, and they had all been mostly resident in the very district, where it had excited the greatest attention, and been canvassed with the keenest interest, so as to be universally familiar to man, woman, and child. The evidence of Kay, besides, was of the most tainted character; for he had by his own showing been a party to the fraud and wrong which he now thus tardily came forward to expose. Nevertheless, after a trial which lasted from nine o'clock in the morning till half-past twelve at night, a verdict was returned declaring the patent to be bad. Arkwright, in the following November, applied for a new trial, representing that he was now prepared with affidavits contradicting many things in the evidence of Kay and the other witnesses; but the Court refused to grant the motion; it was held that, even if the story which Kay and Highs told should be given up, the verdict ought to stand, and the patent to be invalidated, on the ground of the insufficiency of the specification.

21. After this Arkwright made no more efforts in the Courts of Law, spent no more of his time, money, and strength in the pursuit of justice under difficulties. His friends never doubted that the story brought forward at the last trial was a fiction from beginning to end. He wisely determined to be satisfied with this conviction of those to whom he was best known. And, like a brave man as he showed himself through his whole career, he resolved to try whether, as he had taken the start of others in inventive ingenuity, he could not also set his rivals and opponents at defiance without the protection of his patent, and only by the exertion of his activity and energy in free and equal competition. The course that he thus took was crowned with the deserved success; but that success was not lightly achieved. He and his partners had expended more than

twelve thousand pounds before the speculation in which they had engaged begun to pay. And even to the end of his life Arkwright's attention was almost incessantly given to the superintendence of his various factories. He allowed himself no repose; the work in which his heart was, that was his relaxation. The new branch of industry and of national wealth which he had created became, as it were, his world. And, as he had in a manner made it, so it in return made another man of him, not only in his worldly fortunes and position, but to some extent in mind and facutly. New powers seemed to be developed in him by the new demands made upon him. "The originality and comprehension of Sir Richard Arkwright's mind," says one of his biographers, "were perhaps marked by nothing more strongly than the judgment with which, although new to business, he conducted the great concerns his discoveries gave rise to, and the systematic order and arrangement which he introduced into every department of his extensive works. His plans of management, which must have been entirely his own, since no establishment of similar kind then existed, were universally adopted by others; and, after long experience, they have not yet in any material point been altered or improved."

Arkwright received the honour of knighthood on occasion of going up with an address to the king as High Sheriff of Derby in 1786. Although originally a man of great personal strength, he had been all his life a sufferer from asthma; and he was carried off by a complication of this and other disorders in August. 1792, when he had not yet completed his sixtieth year. GEORGE L. CRAIK.

Arts and Manufactures.

THE FLAX PLANT.

BY JAMES MACADAM, JUN.

LESSON I.

GROWTH.

"And Solomon had horses brought out of Egypt and linen yarn: the king's merchants received the linen yarn at a price." 1. NEXT to cotton, the vegetable most largely employed in substance, in textile manufactures, is the fibre of the flax plant. Its employment in the fabrication of clothing apparently dates from a very remote antiquity. We find frequent references to it in the Old Testament, the earliest being in the book of Genesis, where it is recorded that, during Joseph's administration of Egypt, Pharaoh arrayed himself in vestures of fine linen. At that period, and for a long time subsequently, flax was grown very extensively in the East, where it is indigenous, and its manufacture was the leading branch of textile industry among the Egyptians. On the walls of certain tombs in Upper Egypt may be seen, to the present day, paintings representing the processes of culture and manufacture; and it would appear that not only was linen the chief, if not the sole article of clothing, in that country, but the Sacred Writings inform us that a considerable export of yarn and flaxen fabrics took place to Israel and Tyre; and according to Herodotus, a like trade was, at a later period, carried on with Greece.

2. The most striking illustration of the extent to which linen was used by the Egyptians is found in the fact that, without an exception, all the mummy-wrappings are composed of flax. This, which had been long disputed, was ascertained beyond doubt, through the use of the microscope. As seen through that instrument the

fibres of cotton appear in the form of flattened cylinders twisted somewhat like a corkscrew, and without any joints; whereas flax fibres are found to be transparent tubes, straight and cylindrical, and jointed like the sugarcane. These distinctive characters of cotton and flax are presented, no matter how they may have been treated in the processes of manufacture, and the microscope is thus an unerring test. Among the mummy-cloths are some fabrics of extreme fineness, seldom rivalled at the present day, notwithstanding the great facilities for manufacturing flax which the adoption of machinery has afforded. And what makes this still more curious is, that the flax now grown in Egypt is so coarse that it could not be made into a fabric one-third as fine as those which, after a lapse of three thousand years, are to be found in catacombs by the Nile.

3. Originally confined to the East, the flax plant was probably carried across the Mediterranean into Europe by the Phoenician merchants, and the Greek colonists of Egypt and Syria. No other vegetable fibre being then employed by the European nations for clothing, the culture of this plant rapidly spread over all the continent, and its manufacture became an integral part of the domestic routine. The songs and tales of Europe abound with references to this, and the term "spinster" derives its origin from the spinning of flax having been the constant indoor occupation of unmarried women. There does not appear to be any trace of its use in Britain until the Saxon invasion; after that the chronicles and rude illustrations of our ancestors frequently notice it.

It would appear that the flax plant, when acclimated in Europe, found a climate and soil more favourable to the maturing of a fibre suited to the general range of manufacture, for while its growth extended so greatly westwards, it gradually declined in the east. At the present day few Asiatic countries grow flax; and where, as in the peninsula of Hindoostan, it is cultivated, no use is made of the fibre, the seed only being the planter's