Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/514

 handled. As each sounding-board represents a piano, one can easily estimate from this basis of observation alone the wonderful dimensions of the piano trade. The unique business in Dolgeville is well worthy of study as a curious example of American industrial life. Its relation to the piano industry is apparent.

In 1850 there were 204 establishments in this country making musical instruments; piano-fortes were not separately reported upon; 2,307 hands were employed, and the product represented $2,580,715. We find that in 1860 21,707 pianos, representing $6,518,432, were manufactured in the United States. The annexed table of statistics shows the industry in 1880, and is the latest:

When the statistics for 1890 appear, it will be found that the increase in production has been even larger in proportion during the last ten years.

says Mr. A. II. Green in Nature, "may have been the far-seeing premonition of men in advance of their age in the dim past, and however invaluable may have been the additions made to the superstructure since, it can scarcely be doubted that the foundation-stones of geology were Laid by Scotch-men and Englishmen toward the end of the last and during the earlier part of the present century. And what a charm there is about the story of those sturdy pioneers—not perhaps quite the men whom one would have picked out as most fitted or most likely to become the fathers of a new science! It has about it the elements of a genuine romance. For the early training of few of these men was such as to give a scientific bent to their mind; they did not have what we are pleased to call 'the advantage of a scientific education'; it is probable that they never spoke, perhaps never dreamed of such a phrase as 'the scientific method,' which we are so fond of formularizing, and on which we plume ourselves somewhat. But in spite of these seeming drawbacks, rather perhaps because with these men genius was allowed to run its spontaneous, untrammeled course, they opened out to mankind a domain of knowledge, the very outskirts of which had been barely touched upon before.