THE EARLY HISTORY OF FELT

HE art of making felt by rolling, beating, and pressing animal hair T or flocks of wool into a compact mass of even consistency is assuredly older than the ar t of spinning and weaving. In point of time, felted stuffs followed immediately, or originated contemporaneously with, the custom of using animal skins or furs as garments. Felting was practised in times of great antiquity both in Asia and Europe, but it was restricted to these two continents. It is noteworthy that it has always been absent in Africa. Even in ancient Egypt where sheep were reared and their wool woven into cloth felt was unknown. I t did not exist either in aboriginal America. The ancient Peruvians, although they had domesticated the llama and alpaca, did not conceive the notion of felt. There are ancient records extant that give references to felt in Chinese, Greek, and Latin literatures. We must not imagine, however, that for this reason the Chinese, Greeks, and Romans were the first nations to have made useof felt. The Greeks lived in proximity to the roving Scythians of southern Russia; and the vast steppes stretching east of the Ural and the Caspian sea across Russian and Chinese Turkestan into southern Siberia and Mongolia were, from earliest times, the playground of ever moving tribes, restless like the waves of the oceans, of Iranian, Turkish, Mongol, and Tungusian nationalities. These tribesmen of nomadic habits subsisted on the wealth of their flocks consisting of cattle, camels, sheep, goats, and horses. The making of felt naturally presupposes the existence of woolfurnishing domestic animals like sheep, goat, and camel. While it is true that felt can be made and has been made from the hair of wild animals, the supply of such hair is not plentiful enough to establish the industry on a large scale. It is therefore clear that solely peoples who possess a large stock of herds of wool-bearing sheep and camels could call into life