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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 considera- 

 tion of the relations of the various factors of 

 which they are composed necessarily leads to 

 wrong conclusions, and even when these ele- 

 ments 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 manufac- 

 ture in the United States is a fictitious total, 

 represei\ting a vast conglomeration of dupli- 

 cations 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 con- 

 tends, 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 re- 

 turns. The most essential factor for such a 

 calculation the prime value of all the raw 

 materials in their first crude form is miss- 

 ing. 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 seri- 

 ously reduces its share, while it further has 

 to suffer the loss by wear and tear. The re- 

 turn on capital invested in manufacturing en- 

 terprise 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 re- 

 ceives 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. Tonng. A re- 

 markable 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 hid- 

 den, while the less luminous ones giving the 

 dark lines are still in view. During that in- 

 stant 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 ob- 

 servations have been made going to confirm 

 Prof. Young's views in a general way, but in 

 none of them was a permanent record ob- 

 tained till the eclipse of August, 1890, at 

 Novaya Zemlya, when Mr. Shackelton, seiz- 

 ing 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, 



