SPINNING, the process of twisting into fine threads of uniform size fibres of cotton, flax, wool or other fibres for weaving Pur poses. The process was performed by hand from early Egyptian times with the distaff and spindle, the distaff being a stick or staff on which a mass of carded raw material called a loving was loosely bound and the spindle being a smaller round stick, usually weighted, to which the thread was attached and with which it was twirled into a thread or yarn by adroit manipulation. The art of spinning thus came to include two distinct operations: the draw ing out and evening the fibre which was to form the thread; and the twisting of it. In hand-weaving the first was done by the fingers of the left hand; the second by the right hand.
The spinning-wheel to revolve the spindle, attached to its frame, was an improvement on the manual method, introduced from India into Europe during the 14th century and thence to America in the 17th century. Its use did not begin to he displaced until the middle of the 18th century. and it was still to he seen in op eration at the beginning of the last quarter of the 19th century, in many provincial places un touched by railways, throughout Europe and other parts of the world. The operation usually performed by young women gave rise among English-speaking people to the word "spinster.
The India wheel was comparatively large and the operator stood at her work, walking away and back as the forming of the thread seemed to requre. A wool-spinner working continuously would thus travel 20 miles a day. The next development was the "Saxony wheel* or flax wheel, Invented in Nuremburg about 1530. This wheel was much smaller in diam eter and operated by a treadle, the spinner sit ting at her work. The driving-cord of the Saxony wheel was in two loops, one passing around the pulley of the spindle and the other around the pulley of a bobbin or reel on which the yarn was wound as it was spun. Later two spindles were in use on the Saxony wheel by expert spinners, who thus doubled the usual amount of thread in a given time. With the improvement of the loom, so that its output was quadrupled, the demand for yarns was sud denly increased beyond the capacity of the hand spinners. Invention was thus stimulated and in 1738 two spinners, John Wyatt and Lewis Paul, devised and patented a method of drawing out and evening the fibre preparatory to twisting, by means of rollers revolving upon one another. For some unexplained reason this mechanism failed to come into popular use in the spinning trade until 30 years later, when the idea was adopted by Richard Arkwright and embodied in his throstle machine. In quick succession, at the beginning of the last third of the 18th cen tury appeared Hargreave's spinning jenny, an improvement on the double-thread producing Saxon wheel; Arkwright's throstle machine, or roll-drawing spinning machine; and Cromp ton's mule-spinner, three inventions which revo lutionized the art of spinning. Although many important improvements have been made since in constructive details, the general priciples of all modern spinning machinery are those of these three inventions.
The spinning jenny invented by James Har greave's in 1767, in its simplest form, resembled a number of spindles turned by a common wheel or drum which was worked by hand. It stretched out the threads as in common spin ning of carded cotton, eight at a time, but this was soon improved upon and with the applica tion of power as many as 80 could be spun as easily. The drawing was done by a movable
carriage on a track which simulated the move ment of the walking spinner at the India wheel.
The throstle or roll-drawing spinning ma chine, patented by Arkwright in 1769, accom plished its object, the drawing of the rovings, through the action of successive pairs of roll ers, each pair in advance of the others and moving at different rates of speed. The first pair to receive the sliver compressed it and passed it to the second pair, which revolved at a greater speed and thus pulled it out to ex actly the number of times greater length that their revolutions exceeded those of the other pair. As the roving issued through the last rollers of each machine, it was received on spools or reels, calculated to hold a given quan tity; and these were transferred to the spin ning-frames, which resembled the roving frames. As the roving unwound from the but his conception is very different from the or dinary theological one. In the first place the world is not regarded as dependent on the will of God, but as the necessary result of his nature or essence. Everything necessarily fol lows from the nature of God, just as the prop erties of the triangle or circle follow, from the nature of these figures. The bond which necessarily unites all of the parts of the uni verse to the common centre or substance, and thus to each other, is not causal in the usual sense of that relation, but rather logical. God is the underlying ground from whose nature or essence all things proceed in a regular and uniform order. God does not act as a man acts by setting plans or purposes before him self and then proceeding to realize them, nor has he emotions or passions like men which move him now in this direction and now in that. Spinoza satirizes unsparingly the ex ternal teleology and anthropomorphism of his day which sought to explain the course of natural events by referring them to special ends and purposes on the part of God. For Spinoza, God is not transcendent, existing apart from nature, but nature itself as an active self-determining process (natura natu sans) is God. The one infinite substance, or God, has an infinite number of attributes, but it is known to us solely through the two attri butes of extension and thought. Thus every physical thing is a mode of extension, and every idea a mode of the attribute of thought. The physical and the psychical are not inde pendent substances, as Descartes supposed, nor is there any interaction between them. The truth is, that physical things and thoughts are modes which express the nature of the one sub stance, but each side expresses this nature in terms of a different attribute. Yet though there is no interaction there is an exact cor respondence between the modes of extension and the modes of thought: "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things)) This is Spinoza's statement of the Parallelism (q.v.) of mind and body, a doctrine which he was the first to maintain. He develops this theory in some de tail, defining the mind as the "idea of the body," and emphasizing the correlation be tween the perfection and development of the body and the effectiveness and sanity of the mind.