It would be interesting, if space permitted, to describe the great variety of machines that have been invented for dressing, finishing and treating cloths after they are woven: The _teasling_ machine, by which the nap of woollen cloth is raised; the cloth _drying_ machine, with heated rollers, over which the cloth is passed to drive off the moisture acquired in dyeing, washing, etc., the cloth _printing_, _figuring_, _colouring_ and _embossing_ machines, with engraved cylinders; cloth pressing and _creasing_ machines, and the _cloth_ cutting machines for cutting the cloth into strips of all lengths, or for cutting piles of cloth in a single operation into parts of garments corresponding to the prearranged pattern; machines for making _felt_ cloth, and stamping or moulding different articles of apparel from felt, etc., etc. For the making of ribbons and other kind of narrow ware, the needle power loom has been invented, in which the fine weft thread is carried through the web by a needle instead of a shuttle. This adaptation of the needle to looms has placed ribbons within the reach of the poor as well as the rich girl. What a comparison between the work of the virtuous Penelopes and the weavers of a century ago and to-day! Then with her wheel, and by walking to and from it as the yarn was drawn out, and wound up, a maiden could spin twelve skeins of thread in ten hours, producing a thread a little more than three miles in length, while the length of her walk to and fro was about five miles. Now one Penelope can attend to six or eight hundred spindles, each of which spins five thousand yards of thread a day, or, with the eight hundred spindles, four million yards, or nearly twenty-one hundred miles of thread in a day, while she need not walk at all. It was when the weaver threw the shuttle through the warp by hand that Job’s exclamation, “My days are like a weaver’s shuttle” was an appropriate text on the brevity of human life. It may be just as appropriate now, but far more striking, when it is realised that machines now throw the shuttle one hundred and eighty times a minute, or three times a second. Flying as fast as it does, when the shuttle becomes exhausted of yarn a late invention presents a new bobbin and a new supply of yarn to the shuttle without stopping the machine.