The movement of the cotton trade, like that of civilisation, has ever been westward. India is recognised as having been from time immemorial its home, and although there cotton has probably been in use for ages as clothing, there is no evidence to show that the substance was even known in Europe till the tenth, or that its manufacture was commenced in England till the end of the sixteenth, century. At _that_ time the weavers used yarn made from “cotton wool,” as it was called, but which yarn was furnished by the Levant and only used for weft, linen forming the warp. However, the invention of simple hand-spinning apparatus rendered it possible for the ever-increasing demand for cotton yarn to be adequately supplied for a time by English spinsters, and it is chronicled that, in 1701, 1,900,000lb. of raw cotton were imported, although it is improbable that the whole of it was required for conversion into cloth. At the beginning of the eighteenth century such inventions as that of Kay’s fly shuttle so increased the output of the hand loom as to cause for some years a dearth of yarn. This had a good effect in inducing the great era of invention in cotton-spinning machinery, from 1760 to 1780; during which time Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, and many lesser lights brought before the world the results of their labour. These inventions, the importance of which it is not necessary to refer to--their details and the story of their invention having been so frequently dilated upon--these _created_ the cotton manufacture. The cause which influenced the development of spinning machinery was antithetical to that which now caused an extension of the weaving, which was an excess of the supply of yarn, and for which the only consumers were the loomshops attached to scattered houses on the country side, containing one or two ponderous hand-looms. It is rather more than a century since the Rev. E. Cartwright, a Kentish minister, first gave his attention to the invention of a power loom, and although his first patent in 1785 was not satisfactory, yet it is to this clergyman’s efforts that the world is indebted for the first power loom. In 1787, he patented such a machine, fitted with spring motion, batten or slay, temples, etc., with the addition of a protector and weft stop motion in an imperfect form. Nine years afterwards Robert Millar, of Glasgow, applied to it the means of picking by plates and shedding by tappets or wipers.