well. It was not till the eighth year of the reign of William III, that is, 1696, when looms were every where common, that the exportation of them was forbidden;* probably, because the best were made in England, and it was wished that the gradual improvement of them should be kept secret. The penalty also was not death, but a fine and confiscation of the looms.

Some have endeavoured to give an air of probability to this assertion of Savary, by the relation of an apothecary, in the Hotel-Dieu, at Paris. This person is said to have declared, that the inventor was a journeyman lock-smith of Lower Normandy, who gave a pair of silk stockings, his own workmanship, to Colbert, in order that they might be presented to Louis XIV; but as the marchands bonetiers, who dealt in articles knit according to the old manner, caused several loops of these stockings to be cut by some of the servants at court, whom they had bribed for that purpose, they did not meet with approbation. The inventor was so hurt by this disappointment, that he sold the loon to an Englishman, and died an old man in the Hotel-Dieu, where the apothecary became acquainted with him. It was necessary to expose the lives of many workmen, and even of some men of learning, in order to bring back a loom to

* Statutes at large, vol. iii. p. 224.

+ Journal économique, Decemb. 1767.

France. Romè de la Platiere adds, that he heard at Nimes, that in the time of Colbert a person of that place, named Cavellier, carried the first loom to France; and that, in the course of fifty years' the number of the looms in that town and neighbourhood increased to some thousands. It appears much more certain that the stocking manufactory, as Savary asserts, was established at the castle of Madrid in the Bois Boulogne, near Paris, in the year 1656, under the direction of John Hindret.

I do not know at what time the first loom was brought to Germany; but it is certain that this branch of manufacture was spread, chiefly by the French refugees who sought shelter in that country, after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. Winkelmann says expressly, that they carried the first looms to Hesse.* This is not at all improbable, because our stocking manufacturers give French names to every part of their looms, as well as to their different kinds of work. Becher boasts of having introduced the loom at Vienna, and of having first constructed looms of wood. At present, many wooden ones are made at Obernhau,

• Beschreibung von Hessen, 1797, i. p. 391.

↑ Narrische Weisheit und weise Narheit. Franckf. 1688, 12mo. p. 17. I shall in the last place remark, that Leibnitz, in a letter to Vaget, in Uhle's Sylloge nova Epist. varii arg. iii. p. 82, through a lapse of memory calls the loom, of which he wishes for an accurate description, a Scotch invention.

in the Erzgebürge, and sold at the rate of twentyeight dollars; whereas iron ones, of the most inferior kind, are sold in Vogtland for sixty or seventy.

HOPS.

My object, in this article, is not to give a history of beer, because for that purpose it would be necessary to define accurately the different kinds of grain mentioned in the writings of the Greeks and the Romans; and this would be a tedious, as well as difficult, and to me a very unpleasant labour; as I should be obliged to controvert a great many received opinions. I shall only endeavour to answer the question, where and at what time did hops begin to be used as an addition to beer? This subject has already engaged the attention of two learned men,* whose researches I shall employ and enlarge by my own observations.

Hops, at present, are so well known, that a

One of these, in particular, is J. F. Tresenreuter, in A Dissertation on Hops, which was printed at Nuremberg, 1759, 4to, with a preface by J. Heumann, but without the author's name. From this has been taken the whole of what is said in the article Hops in the German Encyclopædia, though the editor, professor Murray, no doubt made some additions. I mention this, though I am under no obligation to that Encyclopædia, because many things have been inserted in it from my collections towards a History of inventions, without any acknowledgement.

formal description of them would be superfluous. I think it necessary, however, for the sake of perspicuity to state what follows.* This plant at present grows wild in the greater part of Europe, and in Germany is common in the hedges and fences. It clings to the trunks of trees, and often climbs round poles, if long enough, to the height of twenty or thirty feet. It is almost every where rough and sharp to the touch, and sometimes clammy. The leaves are generally divided into three and often into five indented lobes; but the upper ones are shaped like a heart, and undivided. The male plants bear flowers, like those of the currant-bush or of the male hemp; the female plants produce their flowers in cones, which are not unlike those of the fir, except that the latter are woody, while the former are foliaceous. These cones only are used for beer; on that account the female plants alone are cultivated, and from these they are picked and dried as soon as they begin to become pulverulent. They are transplanted or propagated by means of seed-buds, in hop-grounds properly prepared, where the cones become larger and better than those of the wild plants, which however are not entirely useless. They are added to beer to render it more palatable, by giving it an agreeable bitter taste; and, at the same time, to make it keep longer; and it must indeed be confessed, that

* See Kerner's Abbildung der œconomischen pflanzen, tab. 433.

of the numerous and various additions which since the earliest periods have been tried, none has better answered the purpose, or been more generally employed.

Among the botanists of the last two centuries, who perused the writings of the Greeks and the Romans, and endeavoured to discover those plants which they meant to describe, many imagined that they found in them hops. But when one takes the trouble to examine, without prejudice, their opinions, nothing appears but a very slight probability; and some even of these learned botanists, such as Matthioli and others, have acknowledged, that it cannot be proved that the Greeks and the Romans were acquainted with our hops.

The plant which perhaps has been chiefly considered as the hop, is the smilax aspera * of Dioscorides,† the same no doubt as that described by Theophrastus, under the name of smilar, without any epithet. That the description agrees, for the most part, with our hops cannot be denied; but it is equally true that it might be applied, with no less propriety, to many other creeping plants, and certainly with the greatest probability to that which in the Linnæan system has retained the name Smilax aspera. What the Grecian writer says of the fruit is particularly applicable to this plant; but,

* Σμελαξ τραχεια.

↑ Dioscor. iv. 244. p. 294.

Histor. Plantar. iii. 18. p. 267.