Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/880

858 est should be centered upon it. We can not go outside our own times. If we do not cave for beauty and harmony in our public buildings, if we are entirely absorbed in seeking our individual prosperity and are oblivious of the social bond, we are not likely to get noble buildings and impressive decorations.

Labor's Share of Profit.—The purpose of a paper by Mr. S. N. D. North, on Some Fallacies of Industrial Statistics, is to point out the false uses that are made of these statistics and the "grotesquely erroneous" deductions that are based upon them. A study of them without thorough consideration of the relations of the various factors of which they are composed necessarily leads to wrong conclusions, and even when these elements are duly regarded, disturbances and variations are constantly interfering, and "fallibility lurks everywhere." Thus, the value given by the census of 1890 of $9,370, 107,624 for the annual products of manufacture in the United States is a fictitious total, representing a vast conglomeration of duplications and reduplications of the finished products of one industry which become the raw materials of the next in the ascending industrial scale, and is about double the real value. There is no way, the author contends, of measuring, with any approximation to accuracy, what are the relative shares of labor and of capital from the results of their joint operation, as revealed in the census returns. The most essential factor for such a calculation—the prime value of all the raw materials in their first crude form—is missing. We do know, however, that the total return of wages by the eleventh census is more than fifty per cent of the aggregate amount added to the value of raw materials. Out of its less than half, moreover, capital has to pay its expenses, and this very seriously reduces its share, while it further has to suffer the loss by wear and tear. The return on capital invested in manufacturing enterprise and on the labor and brains required to manage and direct that enterprise is no larger than, if it is indeed as large as, the return upon the same amount of capital in mercantile and other commercial occupations. Rightly compiled and analyzed, the statistics show that labor gets the lion's share of the net product of industry; reduced to percentages, a share of not less than eighty per cent on the direct return in the form of wages paid to the operative class. Save in rare and exceptional cases, the share which the workingman receives is, as a broad general rule applicable to present business conditions, all that the industry can stand without driving the capital that operates it into some other and more lucrative channel.

Congratulations to Prof. Young.—A remarkable observation was made by Prof. C. A. Young during the solar eclipse of 1870. The dark lines of the solar spectrum are really luminous, and appear dark only by contrast with the much blighter vapors that lie back of those vapors of which they are the signs. At one moment of the eclipse—lasting only a second or two these brighter vapors on the edge of the sun's disk are hidden, while the less luminous ones giving the dark lines are still in view. During that instant these usually dark lines should appear bright. During the eclipse of 1870 Prof. Young caught this happy moment, and saw this reversed, "flash" spectrum of bright lines. "All at once," he says, "as suddenly as a bursting rocket shoots out its stars, the whole field of view was filled with bright lines more numerous than one could count. The duration of the bright lines was only about two seconds, and the layer of vapors must have been under a thousand miles in thickness." At total eclipses since 1870 observations have been made going to confirm \Prof. Young's views in a general way, but in none of them was a permanent record obtained till the eclipse of August, 1890, at Novaya Zemlya, when Mr. Shackelton, seizing the right moment, secured a photograph of the phenomenon. It consists of a very narrow spectrum of bright lines, which are Indeed the Fraunhofer lines reversed just as Prof. Young had described them. "The congratulations of astronomers," says the London Times, "are due to Prof. Young on this complete, though late, confirmation of his observation of 1870, and of his views, speaking broadly, of solar absorption founded upon it." It is a curious circumstance that only three days before this eclipse Prof. Lockyer wrote to Nature that "to my mind the reversing layer is dead and buried already,