pay to it. It is necessary to select the
seed, only from well-formed teasles; but it
has been the habit to gather up such
seed as falls out of the ripe heads in the
course of packing for the market. This is
done to the great damage of the crop.

The change of a high import duty to a
charge of only threepence on a thousand has
encouraged manufacturers to import teasles
freely from the south of France, which produces
the best in the world, on account of
the fine climate usual there at the season
of ripening, when settled hot weather is
required.

Now, however, our own farmers are paying
more than usual attention to this crop.
In several instances we have observed of late
that seed has been imported from France
and America, and that greatly improved
crops have been the consequence of this proceeding.
The seed once chosen must be submitted
to the gentlest nurture. The soil
must be well manured; and, as the plant is
a biennial- occupies two years in coming to
maturity- it demands many months of care.
The ground for it should be ploughed early;
if before winter all the better. Farmers
fancy it to be an exhaustive crop; but we
think they are wrong upon that point. The
spade is in frequent use between the plants
during their growth; and certainly we have
seen excellent crops of wheat following
teasle upon well dressed land. The seed is
usually sown broadcast, but sometimes is
drilled. The drills are about twelve inches
apart; and, when the plants appear they are
thinned out to about the same distance from
each other. To gather in the teasle, harvest
labourers wearing leather gloves go into the
fields each with a short sharp knife. As
soon as the petals fall, a teasle head is fit
for cutting, and there must be several
cuttings of the crop at intervals of a week or
a fortnight; because the heads are not all
ripe at the same time. With each head-
there is cut about nine inches of stalk.

Weather permitting, the cut teasles are
strewed upon the ground to dry; but, if
there be any chance of damp, they must be
housed immediately, or the whole crop may
be spoiled. When they are quite dry they
are sorted according to their quality; which
depends on their size, and tied up into
bundles. The different sizes are known by
the names of kings, queens, middlings, and
scrubs. It is the object of the grower, let
him be never so much of a democrat, to produce
as many kings and queens as possible.
Sometimes he is rewarded with a crop exceeding
in value the price of the land on
which it grew. Sometimes there is not a
single king in the whole field. From three
to six packs of good kings, or twenty thousand
of the middle classes, to the acre, is a
paying crop; but as many as ten or twelve
packs have come up in extraordinary seasons.
There have been curious fluctuations in the
history of the teasle trade. The plant has
stood for the past two or three years at nearly
twice the price it would fetch five or six
years ago. The value now of the best
English teasles is about six pounds per pack.
On one occasion, some time ago, when it was
thought that the use of them was on the
point of being superseded, their price fell
considerably; for, indeed, at the lowest
prices they could hardly find a purchaser.
A lot was at that time sold for five pounds to
a gentleman who died soon afterward. The
proposed substitute for teasle-heads having
turned out a complete failure, the price of
the depreciated crop instantly rose. There
was a serious scarcity of teasles; for the
growth of them had been neglected. The
executors of the gentleman just mentioned,
ignorant of this fact, sent his five pounds'
worth to market, and were astonished to find
that they cleared by it three thousand per
cent.

The use made of teasles by our manufacturers
is so well known that it will suffice to
speak of that in half-a-dozen sentences. A
great manufacturer of broadcloth stores
them by hundreds of thousands. Young
people dexterously set them in frames with
wooden mallets, so that their heads setting
closely together form a vegetable brush or
curry-comb and of such frames ready-prepared
vast numbers are kept on vertical racks in a
wooden building, open to the free passage of
air, like the louvre-boarded building of a
currier. When in use, the teasle-frame is
fixed on the circumference of a machine called
a gig-mile, and the newly-manufactured
woollen cloth is exposed to the combing of
the crooked awns upon the teasle-heads.
These elastic little hooks are precisely strong
enough to insinuate themselves into the web
of the cloth and draw out some fine fibres of
the wool, but they are not strong enough to
tear the web of the cloth; before they can
do injury to that they break. No contrivance
of elastic wire or any other thing
has yet been found to do the work so perfectly.
The cloth is wetted as it slowly
moves under the teasles, and the teasles in
the frames require frequent picking by
children, as well as occasional drying when
they become softened by moisture. Fresh
frames are of course put from time to time
into use, the claws of the teasle-heads not
being very durable. The nap raised in this
way upon cloth is a long nap, of which the
ends are not all equal in length. The cloth
has afterwards to pass under the blade of
a shearing machine, from which it comes
with the smooth short nap which every
man is anxious to retain upon his coat and
trowsers.

The cost of teasle to the millowner is of
course a variable item in the year's expenditure,
yield and consumption affecting so much
the price of the commodity that in one
factory known to us the account for teasles