CTURING

LECTURE I

TEXTILE FIBRES, PRINCIPALLY WOOL, FUR, AND HAIR

_Vegetable Fibres._--Textile fibres may be broadly distinguished as
vegetable and animal fibres. It is absolutely necessary, in order to
obtain a useful knowledge of the peculiarities and properties of animal
fibres generally, or even specially, that we should be, at least to some
extent, familiar with those of the vegetable fibres. I shall therefore
have, in the first place, something to tell you of certain principal
vegetable fibres before we commence the more special study of the animal
fibres most interesting to you as hat manufacturers, namely, wool, fur,
and hair. What cotton is as a vegetable product I shall not in detail
describe, but I will refer you to the interesting and complete work of
Dr. Bowman, _On the Structure of the Cotton Fibre_. Suffice it to say
that in certain plants and trees the seeds or fruit are surrounded, in
the pods in which they develop, with a downy substance, and that the
cotton shrub belongs to this class of plants. A fibre picked out from
the mass of the downy substance referred to, and examined under the
microscope, is found to be a spirally twisted band; or better, an
irregular, more or less flattened and twisted tube (see Fig. 1). We know
it is a tube, because on taking a thin, narrow slice across a fibre and
examining the slice under the microscope, we can see the hole or
perforation up the centre, forming the axis of the tube (see Fig. 2).
Mr. H. de Mosenthal, in an extremely interesting and valuable paper (see
_J.S.C.I._,[1] 1904, vol. xxiii. p. 292), has recently shown that the
cuticle of the cotton fibre is extremely porous, having, in addition to
pores, what appear to be minute stomata, the latter being frequently
arranged in oblique rows, as if they led into oblique lateral channels.
A cotton fibre varies from 2.5 to 6 centimetres in length, and in
breadth from 0.017 to 0.05 millimetre. The characteristics mentioned
make it very easy to distinguish cotton from other vegetable or animal
fibres. For example, another vegetable fibre is flax, or linen, and this
has a very different appearance under the microscope (_see_ Fig. 3). It
has a bamboo-like, or jointed appearance; its tubes are not flattened,
nor are they twisted. Flax belongs to a class called the bast fibres, a
name given to certain fibres obtained from the inner bark of different
plants. Jute also is a bast fibre. The finer qualities of it