Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/134

134 most significant services has been rendered at the Fair by the psychological exhibit and laboratory, over which Prof. Jastrow presides, in the Anthropological Building. Here, amid the most extensive collection of appliances ever brought together in America, quantitative tests of faculty are made: the effect of this new science of experimental psychology on education must be to sift out good methods of instruction from bad, and in the fullness of time to awaken and direct in the individual mind the ambitions which to-day either remain unaroused or ignorantly run riot.

In some respects the most audacious and the least satisfactory part of the programme at Chicago has been the Auxiliary Congresses. Assembled seven miles from Jackson Park, in a building directly abutting on a noisy railroad, filled with smoky and dusty air from locomotives and factory chimneys, the sessions have often been too much for human endurance. With utterly inadequate means the president, Hon. C. C. Bonney, has been unable to provide fitting attendance, or to give suitable publicity to the daily proceedings. Nevertheless, despite shortcomings on every hand, the Art Institute has during the past five months given a hearing to nearly every eminent American teacher, and it has opened its doors to Prof, von Helmholtz, and to other men of science from abroad scarcely less illustrious.



is the duty of the Department of Labor to provide for reports, at intervals of not less than two years, on the general condition, so far as production is concerned, of the leading industries of the country. A shorter period is prescribed than that fixed for the taking of the census, in the belief that a fairer average would be shown in the run of consecutive reports of short terms than could be obtained from reports made every ten years, any two or more of which might be, relatively to the intervening years, exceptional ones. Two years from the organization of the department, however, brought it to the census year 1890, when its report would be merged in or superseded by the census returns; so that it was not deemed expedient to establish the system of reports contemplated till 1892. A method has accordingly been under organization for securing proper information relative to the leading industries of the country which will enable the public to make comparison with the census reports of 1890 as to the movements of production. The department was represented at the Congress on Accidents to Labor held in Berne, and at the Congress of the International Statistical Institute, held at Vienna, in 1891; and it is believed that the experience of American statisticians with reference to labor statistics and the influence of the American representatives prompted the introduction and unanimous adoption of the resolutions of the institute recommending the adoption of similar measures in other countries. The present report, the seventh, continues the investigation of the cost of production in leading countries of articles dutiable in the United States, which was begun in the sixth report and applied in it to iron, steel, bituminous coal, coke, iron ore, and limestone, extending it to the textiles and glass. The facts inquired into include the different elements of cost or approximate cost, the wages paid in the industries involved, the comparative cost of living, the kind of living, etc. All feasible means are used to secure complete information, and, in order that no establishment may be embarrassed by having its inner concerns exposed to the public, the names of all companies and persons who have contributed to the value of the investigation are carefully kept out of sight. The department has aimed to make a judicious selection both as to representative concerns and representative facts; but it does not presume to flatter itself that it has given everything that everybody will want. Two hundred and seventy-eight establishments are represented in the tables, of which forty-nine are 