STOCKING, that part of the clothing of the leg and foot which immediately covers their nudity, and screens them from the cold, &c. Anciently, the only stockings in use were made of cloth, or of milled stuffs sewed together; but since the invention of knitting and weaving stockings of silk, wool, cotton, thread, &c. the use of cloth stockings is quite out of fashion. The modern stockings, whether woven or knit, are a kind of plexuses, formed of an infinite number of little knots called stitches, loops, or masles, intermingled in one another.—Knit stockings are wrought with needles made of polished iron or brass wire, which interweave the threads, and form the masles the stocking consists of. This operation is called knitting; the invention whereof is commonly attributed to the Scots, on this ground, that the first works of this kind came from thence. It is added, that it was on this account that the company of stocking-knitters established at Paris in 1527, took for their patron St. Eustace, who is said to be the son of a king of Scotland.—Woven stockings are ordinarily very fine; they are manufactured on a frame, or machine of polished iron, the structure and apparatus whereof are exceedingly ingenious. The English and French have greatly contested the honour of the invention of the stocking-loom; but we are assured, whatever pretensions the French claim to this invention, that the same was certainly devised by William Lee, of St. John's College, Cambridge, in the year 1589, though it is true, that he first made it public in France, after despairing of success in his own country.