Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/149

Rh proved in this town, giving an annual average of 327,781. An elaborate and exhaustive paper by J. D. Goodman, Esq., the Chairman of the Birmingham Small-Arms Company, which may be found in Mr. Timmins's great work already cited, will supply any one wishing it the most minute and extensive information on the rise and progress of a manufacture which has given the town such a world-wide reputation.

We have now noticed at some length what may be called the manufacturing specialities of Birmingham. It is not the object of this volume, nor would half-a-dozen of the same size be sufficient, to describe those numerous trades which it carries on in common with other large towns in the kingdom. I have sought to impress especially upon the American reader the importance of the place which Birmingham has occupied as a normal school for the artistic, scientific, and skilled industries of the world; as a generating centre of mechanical genius to which no foreign country is so much indebted as the United States. Here is the birth-place of the first Great Exhibition of 1851, and all the International Exhibitions that followed it are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Birmingham Industrial Exhibition in 1849. It was here that Prince Albert not only got the idea but practically the model of what was produced in the Crystal Palace in Hyde