Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/458

434 ton from London to Manchester in 1825 now costs one cent. Counting the macadamized roads, the new and improved wagons, the canals, the river and ocean steamboats, the increase in the number, and the improvements in the size, pattern, rigging, and speed of sailing-vessels, and the railroads, there is no exaggeration in saying that the facilities for domestic and foreign commerce have increased one hundred-fold.

And then the gain in the materials for commerce has been immense. Steam-engines furnish a power estimated to be equal to that of 300,000,000 working-men, and the saving of labor by other machines is probably not less. The production of cloth and the manufacture of iron have been revolutionized, and the annual consumption of the most useful of metals has increased from 200,000 to 12,000,000 tons. The industrial arts generally have made so much progress, that no extensive branch of business is now conducted as it was in the middle of the last century. Our houses, our tools, our clothing, our food, our trades, and our professions, are different in many important points. The farmers have thrown aside the wooden plough, the sickle, and the flail, which were their chief implements in 1750. The wooden mouldboard was excellent as compared with the barbaric plough which had no mould-board, and did not throw a furrow to one side, but merely scratched the ground, making a ridge on each side of the plough-point. While oak was the material, the farmer usually hewed or chopped out his own board, and fastened it on his plough; but both the shape and the adjustment were bad, and the surface, from the nature of the material, would never "scour" well in the moist earth. I accord to Scotland, on what appears to be a preponderance of evidence, the credit of producing the first iron mould-board, though the claim is contested by the United States, where the invention was first generally appreciated, and perfected by various small improvements. The superiority of the iron plough in form, adjustment, and surface, made a vast saving in friction; the furrow was turned over more regularly; the weeds were killed more thoroughly; the pulverization was better; and the working capacity of the ploughman and the productive capacity of the soil were each nearly if not quite doubled; so that now, France, with a smaller number of men engaged in the business, yields three times as much wheat at an average harvest as it did about 1770. Since the farmers are the largest class of producers, and the basis of national prosperity, and since ploughing is the most important part of their labor, the invention of the iron mould-board deserves to be considered one of the greatest contributions to modern civilization, ranking next to the steam-engine and to movable type, in its influence on the general condition of mankind.

The sickle was superseded by the cradle, with which the farmer could cut four times as much, and that by the reaping-machine, with which a man can cut five times as much, as with the cradle. The scythe gave way to the mowing-machine, and the flail to the