That very fine fabrics were produced in Old Mexico, and by implements little if at all better than those here figured, is doubtless true. The highly colored accounts by the conquerors are believed to have been fully warranted by the fineness of the goods which they saw. Indeed, some of the richest of modern shawls and dresses, turned out of the looms of Persia, Egypt, and Hindostan, are but a degree superior to those of the Aztecs. Personal tact and skill are every thing with semi-civilized artisans. The ancient spindle and loom of the East, singularly enough, are still preserved and used for special purposes in modern Rome, just as they were thirty or forty centuries ago. A recent writer on the Pallium (an ecclesiastical robe of lamb's wool) says, there stands about a mile outside the Porta Pia, on the road to Tivoli, an old convent of nuns, attached to the still more ancient church of St. Agnes; that these nuns are poor, and rarely receive any of Rome's high-born damsels to their lonely and neglected cloister; but that they have a small paddock appendant to the monastery, and therein keep a couple of sacred lambs, (not necessarily of the Merino breed,) and are proud and happy ministrants of their wool for the texture of this noble decoration, spinning it, not by any new-fangled jennies, but on the old patriarchal spindle, and weaving it in a loom of which the pattern might date from the days of Penelope. In conclusion, we may remark, of this subject, that to the substitution of circular for straight motions, and of continuous for alternating ones, may be attributed nearly all the conveniences and elegances of civilized life. It is not too much to assert that the present advanced state of science and the arts is due to revolving mechanism. We may speak of the wonders effected by steam and other motive agents, but of what value would they have been without this means of their employment? The applications of rotary in place of other movements are conspicuous in modern history, from those which propel steamships through the water and locomotives over land, to those which are employed in the manufacture of pins and the pointing of needles. It is by this principle that the irregular motion of the ancient flail and the primeval sieve, has become uniform, in threshing, bolting, and winnowing machines; and hence our circular saws, shears, and slitting mills; the abolition of the mode of spreading out metal into sheets with the hammer, for the more expeditious one of passing it through rollers or flatting mills; and the revolving oars, or paddle wheels, for the propulsion of vessels--the process of inking type with rollers in place of balls, the rotary printing presses, and revolving machines for planing iron and other metals, instead of the ancient process of chipping off superfluous portions with chisels, and that still more tedious of smoothing the surfaces with files. But in few things is the effect of this change of