Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/250

240 few inches by rubbing it with the shell of a snail; or the economy of production, as when steel pens, sold when first introduced at one shilling apiece, are now sold at a penny per dozen; or when steel rails, lately costing forty-five pounds per ton, can now be sold at five pounds.

3, Methods of utilizing waste products, or of endowing them with properties which render them of increased value to industry, as when waste scrap-iron and the galls on the oak are converted into ink; or the badly-smelling waste of gas-works is transformed into fragrant essences, brilliant dyes, and fertilizing manure; or when the effete matter of animals or old bones is changed into lucifer-matches.

All three results are often combined when a single end is obtained; at all events, economy of time and production invariably follows when natural forces substitute brute animal force. In industrial progress the sweat of the brow is lessened by the conceptions of the brain. How exultant is the old Greek poet, Antipater, when women are relieved of the drudgery of turning the grindstones for the daily supply of corn! "Woman! you who have hitherto had to grind corn, let your arms rest for the future. It is no longer for you that the birds announce by their songs the dawn of the morning. Ceres has ordered the water-nymphs to move the heavy millstones and perform your labor." Penelope had twelve slaves to grind corn for her small household. During the most prosperous time of Athens it was estimated that there were twenty slaves to each free citizen. Slaves are mere machines, and machines neither invent nor discover. The bondmen of the Jews, the helots of Sparta, the captive slaves of Rome, the serfs of Europe, and uneducated laborers of the present day who are the slaves of ignorance, have added nothing to human progress. But, as natural forces substitute and become cheaper than slave-labor, liberty follows advancing civilization. Machines require educated superintendence. One shoe-factory in Boston by its machines does the work of thirty thousand shoemakers in Paris, who have still to go through the weary drudgery of mechanical labor. The steam-power of the world during the last twenty years has risen from eleven and a half million to twenty-nine million horse-power, or one hundred and fifty-two per cent.

Let me take a single example of how even a petty manufacture improved by the teachings of science affects the comforts and enlarges the resources of mankind. When I was a boy the only way of obtaining a light was by the tinder-box with its quadruple materials, flint and steel, burned rags or tinder, and a sulphur-match. If everything went well, if the box could be found and the air was dry, a light could be obtained in two minutes; but very often the time occupied was much longer, and the process became a great trial to the serenity of temper. The consequence of this was, that a fire or a burning lamp was kept alight through the day. Old Gerard, in his "Herbal," tells