a piece of metal drawn through the hole of an iron into a thread of a fineness answerable to the hole it passed through.

Wires are frequently drawn so fine as to be wrought along with other threads of silk, wool, flax, &c.

The metals most commonly drawn into wire are gold, silver, copper, and iron. Gold-wire is made of cylindrical ingots of silver, covered over with a skin of gold, and thus drawn successively through a vast number of holes, each smaller and smaller, till at last it is brought to a fineness exceeding that of a hair. That admirable ductility which makes one of the distinguishing characters of gold, is nowhere more conspicuous than in this gilt wire. A cylinder of 48 ounces of silver, covered with a coat of gold, only weighing one ounce, as Dr Halley informs us, is usually drawn into a wire, two yards of which weigh no more than one grain; whence 98 yards of the wire weigh no more than 49 grains, and one single grain of gold covers the 98 yards; so that the ten thousandth part of a grain is above one-eighth of an inch long.

WIRE of Lapland. The inhabitants of Lapland have a fort of shining slender substance in use among them on several occasions, which is much of the thickness and appearance of our silver-wire, and is therefore called, by those who do not examine its structure or substance, Lapland wire. It is made of the finest of the rein deer, which being carefully separated in the eating, are, by the women, after soaking in water and beating, spun into a fort of thread, of admirable fineness and strength, when wrought to the smallest filaments; but when larger, is very strong, and fit for the purposes of strength and force. Their wire, as it is called, is made of the finest of these threads covered with tin. The women do this business; and the way they take is to melt a piece of tin, and placing at the edge of it a horn, with a hole through it, they draw these fine-wire threads, covered with the tin, through the hole, which prevents their coming out too thick covered. This drawing is performed with their teeth; and there is a small piece of bone placed at the top of the hole, where the wire is made flat; so that we always find it rounded on all sides but one, where it is flat.

This wire they use in embroidering their clothes as we do gold and silver; they often sell it to strangers, under the notion of its having certain magical virtues.