Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/333

Rh of 1892 that a considerable part of that undertaking shall be devoted to object-lessons in the development of the arts of life, taking as my example spinning and weaving. The distaff, used as it was in the days of Homer, may still be found in use in northern Italy. The hand loom and the spinning-wheel of prehistoric type are presented in these pictures from China. Other methods of spinning, and other wholly different forms of hand loom carried in the hand for weaving narrow stripes, may be brought from central Africa, and so the whole history of the textile arts may be gathered in one place, either by obtaining examples from different parts of the world, or any one may study the whole development of the cotton manufacture if, before it is too late, he will visit the heart of the eastern Kentucky mountains, and from there journey by way of the neighborhood mills of the South to the great factories of the North.



HE political and material progress of the nineteenth century have been truly wonderful. The past year was memorable as the anniversary of the inauguration of the first President of this great republic, and what a record of bewildering changes do those hundred years unfold! Thirteen States have been increased to forty-two, and the center of population has moved back from the seaboard to a point nearly a thousand miles in the interior. The lakes of the North have given birth to gigantic commercial marts, which rival in trade, wealth, and culture those seats of ancient pomp, and empires and cities of mediæval grandeur, which flourished on the shores of the Mediterranean.

The affairs of the remotest portions of this immense domain, together with the world's more notable events, are regularly recorded in the daily press and read the morning following at the breakfast table. The traveler boards the train at New York, having telegraphed his friend in Chicago to meet him at the station twenty-four hours later, giving the exact minute of his arrival at a place a thousand miles distant from his starting-point. A change of cars is made for San Francisco, and after riding over hundreds of miles of fertile prairie covered with growing crops, crossing wide rivers spanned by bridges which fifty years ago were deemed impossible, across boundless plains where countless herds of cattle and flocks of sheep are fed, and passing through vast mountain ranges pierced by tunneled passage-ways, the traveler reaches his destination upon the shores of 