Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/76

66 position must be made a little coarser. Here the "cut and try" method must again be patiently applied.

At length, when the young man can get his watches so that they will not vary more than two and a half seconds a day, whether cold or warm, and no matter how many times they are changed in position, he is entitled to a certificate from the astronomical observatory where the watches are tested, that he is a competent watchmaker.

In the United States men or women or boys learn to run, perhaps, one little machine in a large factory, which cuts or polishes one small part, and do not try or need to understand the whole trade of watchmaking. But in Switzerland the man who makes a watch or any part of it is a watchmaker always, although he will sooner or later decide what part of watchmaking he prefers, and manufacturers will then bring him just that work to do. One man may make a business of merely polishing screw-heads, another does nothing but time watches, etc. There are no large watch factories in Switzerland, such as we have, but all their myriads of watches have been passed round through the little shops of these watchmakers before they have got all their parts and are ready for the pocket.

One of the consequences of the Swiss mode of making a watch is, that its every part is made for that particular watch. This is true not only of the movement but the case. Cases are not interchangeable as with us. Each case is made to fit a given movement, and will not, unless by sheer accident, fit another. A dealer requiring watches must give his order—say for a dozen—to the watchmaker who is making a specialty of the earlier parts of the work, and then the dealer must follow his order on until it is completed and cased.

After observing the thoroughness of the training of which the Swiss workman has the advantage, one hardly wonders that the Swiss are able to produce at once the quantity and quality of watch work for which they are justly famed.

famines in India, which were formerly often terrible, Mr. C. E. D. Black, in his third decennial report of progress, does not deny the existence of "habitually starving millions," but maintains that, taking the country as a whole, it can always furnish food enough for all its inhabitants. The difficulty has hitherto been in moving the surplus of one or other locality to the spots where deficiency exists. This has now been mainly overcome, and the days when grain was selling at famine prices in one district and rotting on the ground in another are gone. Registered meteorological observations indicate that, as a rule, two thirds of India are affected each year, either favorably or prejudicially, differently from the other third. There is no record of a universal failure of crops, any more than of a general harvest above the average.