Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/473

Rh distinctive future. If her wine trade be not as yet as prosperous as she could wish, no one need be surprised at this who has remarked the specialties of character in the different European wines, and considered the centuries of labor and application that have been required to evolve these varied types as the most appropriate to their several localities, as also the great capital employed at low rates of interest in maturing these wines and in educating the tastes of consumers thereto. The production of wool on a large scale is a natural resource of mountainous countries and of regions distant from centers of population, as we see in Wales, portions of Scotland, Germany, and the United States. The marked devotion of Australia to this industry is due to the sudden opening of her unlimited territories, to the nature of her climate, suitable for the rearing of sheep, and to her rainfall, too limited and uncertain for profitable cultivation. Added to these causes is her remoteness from other countries, which, making impossible the export of the animals themselves, dead or alive, on an adequate scale, has allowed her flocks to increase almost unchecked.

As we already saw in the case of the common and bulky natural products, so it is with the corresponding class of manufactured goods; they can not well bear a long and expensive carriage, and therefore, other things being equal, are naturally produced as near as possible to their places of consumption. As in the United States there are numerous contiguous deposits of coal and iron, those most convenient to the large centers of population have been in the mean time utilized, both for fuel and for the heavy iron manufactures, rails, pipes, and machinery, that the various purposes of such communities call for on a great scale. When such articles must necessarily be sent to long distances, those points most convenient to water-carriage are naturally preferred for their production. Pittsburgh is a notable instance of this, also the English, Scotch, Welsh, and Australian coal ports, from which this indispensable mineral is shipped to every part of the world. When especially it is desirable for some manufactures to mix the heavier metals of different countries, such operations must necessarily take place at or near some convenient port. Thus, tin mined in Cornwall is taken to Swansea, the nearest port having iron-works, when required for making tin plates, and imported ores are, by the use of the adjacent coal, also smelted there, as well as at various coal ports in the northwest coast of England and elsewhere. The convenience of both coal and iron has made the river Clyde the chief seat of iron ship-building, just as its local timber made Boston that of wooden ship-building. Makers of boilers, engines, and heavy machinery at Manchester, England, have also discovered that even the thirty miles of rail carriage to Liverpool,