Jacquard's apparatus is, strictly speaking, not a loom, but an appendage to one. It is intended to elevate or depress, by bars, the warp threads for the reception of the shuttle, the patterns being regulated by means of bands of punched cards acting on needles with loops and eyes. At first applied to silk weaving only, the use of this machine has since been extended to the bobbin net, carpets, and other fancy manufactures. By its agency the richest and most complex designs, which could formerly be achieved only by the most skilful labourers, with a painful degree of labour, and at an exorbitant cost, are now produced with facility by the most ordinary workmen, and at the most moderate price. Of late years the silk manufacture has greatly improved, both in character and extent. The products of British looms exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1862 vied with those of the Continent. Every year upwards of L2,300,000 worth of silk is brought to England; and the silk manufacture engages some L55,000,000 of capital, and employs eleven to twelve hundred thousand of our population. The Potter's Art. I.--LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. II.--BERNARD PALISSY. III.--JOSIAH WEDGWOOD. The Potter's Art. I.--LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. There can be little doubt as to the antiquity of the pottery manufacture. It probably had its origin in that of bricks, which at a very early date men made for purposes of construction; but it is not impossible that he had previously contrived to fabricate the commoner articles of domestic economy, such as pans and dishes, of sun-dried clay. Bricks, as everybody knows, are fashioned out of a coarse clay, such as we meet with in very numerous localities. After mixing up with water a kind of paste out of these clayey earths, the moulder works up the paste into the shape of bricks, and they are then exposed to the heat of the kiln. Sometimes it was thought sufficient to dry these bricks in the rays of a burning sun; but, so dried, their solidity is very inconsiderable. Baked bricks owe their redness of colour to the oxide of iron which they contain. They are either moulded with the hand or cast in rectangular frames of wood, dusted with sand. To bake them, they are piled up in huge stacks, in which intervals are left for storing and kindling the fuel. They are also baked in kilns. The commoner pottery wares are manufactured with the coarse impure clays, which are allowed to rot in trenches for several years to render them more plastic. Flower-pots, sugar-pans, vases, and other and more graceful articles, are moulded on the potter's wheel.