At this time the jenny had superseded the hand-wheel and was in use over a wide area, including such centres as Blackburn, Bury, Oldham, Ashton, and Stockport, but the stage had been reached when in turn, so far as cotton-spinning was concerned, the jenny was to be superseded by the mule.[386] To a lesser extent the same may be said of the mule in relation to the water-frame. The mule, however, was pre-eminently a machine for spinning the finer counts of yarn; it was owing to this fact that it gave rise to new branches of trade; in spinning warp yarn and the coarser counts generally there was still scope for Arkwright’s spinning-machine. The mule and the jenny were rivals in a way, and to an extent that the mule and the water-frame were not.[387] Even this rivalry was absent as between the mule and Arkwright’s machinery for the processes preparatory to spinning, and with the cancellation of his patent roving-making for a time became a distinct business. This was exceedingly important to the small spinners, to whom the rovings were chiefly sold, as they now got the advantage of methods of preparation previously confined to mill-owners who had adopted the patent machinery.[388] [Footnote 386: _Ibid._, p. 330. According to Guest, at the time he wrote (1828) the jenny was used in the woollen industry even more extensively than ever it had been in the cotton industry (_British Cotton Manufacture_, p. 147).] [Footnote 387: Baines, _ibid._, p. 198. Evidence of Mr. G. A. Lee before the Committee on Crompton’s petition. _Infra_, p. 188.] [Footnote 388: Kennedy, _ibid._, p. 336. _Autobiography of Robert Owen_, i., pp. 25-26: “My three spinners were spinning the cotton yarn on my three mules from _rovings_. I had no machinery to make rovings, and was obliged to purchase them,--they were the half-made materials to be spun into thread. I had become acquainted with two industrious Scotchmen, of the names of M‘Connel and Kennedy, who had also commenced about the same time as myself to make cotton machinery upon a small scale, and they had now proceeded so far as to make some of the machinery for preparing the cotton for the mule spinning machinery so far as to enable them to make the rovings, which they sold in that state to the spinners at a good profit.... This was in the year 1790.... _They_ could then only make the _rovings_, without finishing the thread; and I could only _finish_ the thread, without being competent to make the _rovings_.”]