Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/494

480 followed its introduction, and what part it plays in the welfare of man.

The inquiry soon becomes a bewildering one.

Take paper, for instance. I believe we are indebted to the Chinese for its invention. Do we ever think of it as one of the great inventions of man? Why, it is nothing but rags ground up in water to a pulp, spread out in a thin sheet, and dried. I think the art of making paper has been known in Europe less than a thousand years. It has taken the place of parchment for writing. It made the art of printing possible. It made the newspaper possible, and especially the daily paper. The multiplication of pictures by engraving could not be carried on without it, nor the modern art of photography, to which I shall refer again. We attach great value to a system of general education as one of the most important agencies of modern civilization. But the first requisite of such a system is cheap books, and for these paper is the only thing we could use. Would any of you undertake to enumerate within the next half-hour all the uses to which paper is put? Would you undertake to name and describe all the kinds that are used?

Paper is largely made of rags. Rags presuppose the existence of cloth. Cloth is the product of two distinct inventions, spinning and weaving. Spinning and weaving are very old inventions, but even in their simplest form they involve the use of still older inventions. Whatever material is used for paper, a long line of antecedent inventions is involved in its use.

Paper must, I think, rank as one of the great inventions of man, and, if the heathen Chinese had given the world nothing more than this, he would have made no small contribution to the progress of civilization.

I have said that paper is made from rags, and that cloth implies the arts of spinning and weaving. But it also implies much more. To me, one of the greatest marvels of human industry is a yard of cotton cloth at the price at which it is sold. The price of a yard of cotton cloth of the kind called print-cloth, and which when printed becomes calico, is less than four cents, and the cotton itself costs half this sum. What inventions are involved in the raising of the cotton and its transportation to the mill where it is to be converted into cloth! Of course we all think of the cotton-gin, because that invention was made with special reference to the production of cotton, and has been much referred to as a striking example of the results which flow from an invention.

But the gin comes into use only after the cotton is grown. Of course the common agricultural inventions are used in raising cotton: the plow, the hoe, the machinery by which the plow is made, the arts of making iron and steel, including the machinery employed, the harness for the horse or mule which draws the plow, and the art of