the destruction of their business, and they arose in their wrath, and demolished Hargreaves’ labours. It was a hard time for inventors. The law of England then was that patents were invalid if the invention was made known before the patent was applied for, and part of the public insisted on demolishing the invention if it was so made known, so that to avoid the law and the lawless the harassed inventors kept and worked their inventions in secret as long as they could. Hargreaves fled to Nottingham, where works were soon started with his spinning jennys. The ideas of Kay, Wyatt and Hargreaves are said to have been anticipated in Italy. There were makers of cloths at Florence, and also in Spain and the Netherlands, who were far in advance of the English and French in this art, but the descriptions of machinery employed by them are too vague and scanty to sustain the allegation. And now the long ice age of hand working was breaking up, and the age of machine production was fast setting in. Hargreaves was in the midst of his troubles and his early triumphs, in 1765-1769, when Richard Arkwright entered the field. Arkwright, first a barber, and then a travelling buyer of hair, and finally a knight, learned, as he travelled through Lancashire, Lichfield, Blackburn and Nottingham, of the inventions and labours of Wyatt, Kay and Hargreaves. Possessed as he was of some mechanical skill and inventive genius, and realising that the harvest was ripe and the labourers few, entered the field of inventions, and with the help of Kay, revived the old ideas of John Wyatt and Lewis Paul of spinning by rollers, which had now slumbered for thirty years. Kay and Arkwright constructed a working model, and on this Arkwright by hard pushing and hard work obtained capital, and improved, completed and patented his machine. The machine was first used by him in a mill erected at Nottingham and worked by horses; then at Cromford, and in this mill the power used to drive the spinning machine was a water wheel. His invention was therefore given the name of the _water_ frame, which it retained long after steam had been substituted for water as the driving power. It was also named the _throstle_, from the fact that it gave a humming or singing sound while at work; but it is commonly known as the _drawing_ frame. Arkwright patented useful improvements. He had to contend with mobs and with the courts, which combined to destroy his machines and his patent, but he finally succeeded in establishing mills, and in earning from the Government, manufacturers, and the public a great and well-merited munificence. It is a remarkable coincidence that Watt’s steam engine patent and Arkwright’s first patent for his spinning machine were issued in the same year--1769. The new era of invention was dawning fast.