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BUTTON MANUFACTURE.

receiving articles of more intrinsic value in exchange. In 1853, the English exports of hardware and cutlery amounted to more than three millions and a half sterling. No article of ready attainment, and therefore of general consumption, whether it be a laborer's spade or a child's marble, is unImportant in a commercial point of view. The wooden figures of horses and sheep that may be bought for a few cents in the toy-shops furnish employment to cut them, during the long winter nights, to a large portion of the peasantry of the Tyrol. The Swiss peasant cuts a piece of white wood into a boy or a cottage, as he is tending his herd on the side of a mountain. These become considerable articles of export. In the town of Sonneberg, near the forest of Thuringia, Germany, four thousand inhabitants are principally employed in the toy-trade, and also find employment for the neighboring villagers. Mr. Osler, an English manufacturer of Birmingham, some years ago, addressing a Committee of the House of Commons upon the subject of his beads and trinkets, said "On my first journey to London, a respectable-looking man in the city asked me if I could supply him with dolls' eyes; and I was foolish enough to feel half offended. I thought it derogatory to my new dignity as a manufacturer to make dolls' eyes. He took me into a room quite as wide and perhaps twice the length of this room (one of the large rooms for Committees in the House of Commons), and we had just room to walk between stacks, from the floor to the ceiling, of parts of dolls. He said, "These are only the legs and arms-the trunks are below.' But I saw enough to convince me that he wanted a great many eyes; and as the article appeared quite in my own line of business, I said I would take an order by way of experiment; and he showed me several specimens. I copied the order. He ordered various quantities and of various sizes and qualities. On returning to my hotel, I

found that the order amounted to upward of two thousand dollars.

Mr. Osler tells this story to show the importance of trifles. The making of dolls' eyes afforded subsistence to many ingenious workmen in glass toys; and in the same way the most minute and apparently insignificant article of general use, when rendered cheap by chemical science or machinery, produces a return of many thousand pounds, and sets in motion labor and laborers. Without the science and the machinery, which render the article cheap, the laborers would have had no employ, for the article would not have been consumed. What a pretty article is a common tobaccopipe, of which millions are used! It is made cheap and beautiful in a mold-a machine for copying pipes. If the pipe were made without the mold, and other contrivances, it would cost at least a shilling instead of a cent: the tobacco-smoker would go without his pipe, and the pipe-maker without his employment.

Among articles of great demand that have become of importance, though apparently insignificant, in our own day, there is nothing more worthy of notice than the Friction or Lucifer Match. About twenty years ago chemistry abolished the tinder-box; and the burnt rag that made the tinder went to make paper. Slowly did the invention spread. The use of the match is now so established that machines are invented to prepare the splints. In New York, one match manufactory annually cuts up a large raft of timber for matches. The English matches are generally square, and thus thirty thousand splints are cut in a minute. The American matches are round; and the process of shaping being more elaborate, four thousand five hundred splints are cut in a minute. We will follow a bundle of eighteen hundred of thin splints, each four inches long, through its conversion into three thousand six hundred matches.

Without being separated, each end of the bundle is first dipped into sulphur. When dry, the splints, adhering to each other by means of the sulphur, must be parted by what is called dusting. A boy, sitting on the floor with a bundle before him, strikes the matches with a sort of mallet on the dipped ends till they become thoroughly loosened. They have now to be plunged into a preparation of phosphorus or chlorate of potash, according to the quality of the match. The phosphorus produces the pale, noiseless fire; the chlorate of potash the sharp crackling illumination. After this application of the more inflammable substance, the matches are separated, and dried in racks. Thoroughly dried, they are gathered up again into bundles of the same quantity, and are taken to the boys who cut them; for the reader will have observed that the bundles have been dipped at each end. There are few things more remarkable in manufactures than the extraordinary rapidity of this cutting process and that which is connected with it. The boy stands before a bench, the bundle on his right hand, a pile of empty boxes on his left. The matches are to be cut, and the empty boxes filled, by this boy. A bundle is opened; he seizes a portion, knowing by long habit the required number with sufficient exactness; puts them rapidly into a sort of frame, knocks the ends evenly together, confines them with a strap which he tightens with his foot, and cuts them in two parts with a knife on a hinge, which he brings down with a strong leverage. The halves lie projecting over each end of the frame; he grasps the left portion and thrusts it into a half open box, which slides into an outer case; and he repeats the process with the matches on his right hand. This series of movements is performed with a rapidity almost unexampled; for in this way, two hundred thousand matches are cut, and two thousand boxes filled in a day, by one boy.

It

It is a law of this manufacture that the demand is greater in the summer than in the winter. The increased summer demand for the matches shows that the great consumption is among the masses-the laboring population-those who make up the vast majority of the contributors to duties of customs and excise. In the houses of the wealthy there is always fire; in the houses of the poor, fire in summer is a needless hourly expense. Then comes the match to supply the want to light the afternoon fire to boil the kettle. is now unnecessary to run to the neighbor for a light, or, as a desperate resource, to work at the tinder-box. The matches sometimes fail, but they cost little, and so they are freely used, even by the poorest. Their value was suffi ciently shown when an English officer in camp at Sebastopol recently wrote home that no want was greater than that of the ready means of procuring fire and light, and that he should hold a box of matches cheap at half a crown.

We may notice one other article of almost universal use, which is of very recent introduction-the envelop. It is a labor-saving contrivance for the writer of letters. The use of the envelop has been mainly created by cheap postage. A machine has been invented for their manufacture, which is able to produce twenty-five thousand envelops in a single day.

CHAPTER XXI.

LABOR-SAVING CONTRIVANCES.THE NICK IN TYPES.-CASTING SHOT.-CANDLE-DIPPING.-TIRING A WHEEL.-GLOBE-MAKING.-DOMESTIC AIDS TO LABOR-AIDS TO MENTAL LABOR.-EFFECTS OF SEVERE BODILY LABOR ON HEALTH AND DURATION OF LIFE.

WE drew attention in the last chapter to a particular process in needle-making-the sorter's sheath-to show that great saving of labor may be effected by what is not popularly called machinery. In modern times, wherever work is carried on upon a large scale, the division of labor is applied; by which one man attending to one thing learns to perform that one thing more perfectly than if he had attended to many things. He thus saves a considerable portion of the whole amount of labor. Every skillful workman has individually some mode of working peculiar to himself, by which he lessens his labor. An expert blacksmith, for instance, will not strike one more blow upon the anvil than is necessary to produce the effect he desires. A composi tor, or printer who arranges the types, is a swift workman when he makes no unnecessary movement of his arms or fingers in lifting a single type into what is called his composing-stick, where the types are arranged in lines. There is a very simple contrivance to lessen the labor of the composi tor, by preventing him putting the type into his composingstick the wrong side outward. It is a nick, or two, or three nicks, on the side of the type which corresponds with the lower side of the face of the letter. By this nick or nicks he is enabled to see by one glance of his eye on which side