ABSTRACT
ALTHOUGH there is hardly an animal or vegetable fibre that can be spun and woven which may not find its way into the woollen and worsted mills, yet there is neither space nor need, in a book dealing with those industries, to follow the production and marketing of cotton or jute, silk or china grass. We are concerned with wool, with those animal fibres most nearly akin to it, and with woollen rags. Even thus limited the field is wide enough, for there is no country where wool is not grown, few from which it is not now and then brought into England. We grow it largely at home and it comes to us from Iceland and Russia, Persia and Peru, from China, Switzerland, Canada and the West Indies, as well as from the great wool-growing lands, such as Australia, New Zealand and the Argentine Republic. The rags, too, come from many countries. However, the main lines of the international and domestic trades are 77tolerably simple, though the details are curiously complex.
