in commerce, the act or art of reducing flax, hemp, wool, hair, or other matters, into thread. Spinning is either performed on the wheel, or with a distaff and spindle, or with other machines. proper for the several kinds of working. Hemp, flax, nettle-thread, and other like vegetable matters, are to be wetted in spinning; silks, wools, &c. are spun dry, and do not need water; yet there is a way of spinning or reeling silk as it comes off the cases or balls, where hot and even boiling water is to be used (see SILK). The vast variety, and the importance of those branches of our manufactures, which are produced from cotton, wool, and flax, spun into yarn, together with the cheapness of provisions, and the low price of labour in many foreign countries, which are our rivals in trade, have occasioned many attempts at home to render spinning more easy, cheap, and expedient. For which see COTTON SPINNING and COTTON MILLS.

These contrivances have in some parts of Scotland been applied to the spinning of flax; but a very considerable improvement has lately been made by Mr Antis of Fulneck near Leeds of the common spinning wheel. It is well known, that hitherto much time has been lost by stopping the wheel in order to shift the thread from one staple on the flyer to another; but in Mr Antis's wheel the bobbin is made to move backwards and forwards, so as to prevent the necessity of this perpetual interruption, as well as to obviate the danger of breaking the thread and losing the end. This is effected by the axis of the great wheel being extended through the pillar next the spinner, and formed into a pinion of one leaf A, which takes into a wheel B, seven inches diameter, having on its periphery 97 teeth; so that 97 revolutions of the great wheel cause one of the lesser wheel. On this lesser wheel is fixed a ring of wire C; which, being supported on six legs, stands obliquely to the wheel itself, touching it at one part, and projecting nearly three quarters of an inch at the opposite side; near the side of this wheel is an upright lever C, about 15 inches long, moving on a centre, three inches from its lower extremity, and connected at the top to a sliding bar D; from which rises an upright piece of brass E, which working in the notch of a pulley drives the bobbin F backward and forward, according as the oblique wire forces a pin G in or out, as the wheel moves round. To regulate and affix the alternate motion, a weight H hangs by a line to the sliding bar, and passing over a pulley I rises and falls as the bobbin advances or recedes, and tends constantly to keep the pin in contact with the wire. It is evident, from this description, that one staple only is wanted to the flyer; which, being placed near the extremity K, the thread passing through it is by the motion of the bobbin laid regularly thereon. For this invention the Society instituted at London for the Encouragement of Arts, &c. gave the author a premium of twenty guineas.