THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 267 



derstanding of it. A simple illustration of this will prepare the way 

 for more involved illustrations. 



A few months ago, the Times gave us an account of the last 

 achievement in automatic printing the "Walter Press," by which its 

 own immense edition is thrown off in a few hours every morning. 

 Suppose a reader of the description, adequately familiar with mechan- 

 ical details, follows what he reads step by step with full comprehen- 

 sion perhaps making his ideas more definite by going to see the 

 apparatus at work and questioning the attendants ? Now he goes 

 away considering he understands all about it. Possibly, under its 

 aspect as a feat in mechanical engineering, he does so. Possibly also, 

 under its biographical aspect, as implying in Mr. Walter and those 

 who cooperated with him certain traits, moral and intellectual, he 

 does so. But under its sociological aspect he has no notion of its 

 meaning, and does not even suspect that it has a sociological aspect. 

 Yet, if he begins to look into the genesis of the thing, he will find that 

 he is but on the threshold of the full explanation. On asking not what 

 is its proximate but what is its remote origin, he finds, in the first 

 place, that this automatic printing-machine is lineally descended from 

 other automatic printing-machines, which have undergone successive 

 developments each presupposing others that went before : without 

 cylinder printing-machines long previously used and improved, there 

 would have been no " Walter Press." He inquires a step further, and 

 discovers that this last improvement became possible only by the 

 help of papier-mdche stereotyping, which, first employed for making 

 flat plates, afforded the possibility of making cylindrical plates. And 

 tracing this back, he finds that plaster-of-paris stereotyping came 

 before it, and that there was another process before that. Again he 

 learns that this highest form of automatic printing, like the many 

 less-developed forms preceding it, depended for its practicability on 

 the introduction of rollers for distributing ink, instead of the hand- 

 implements used by " printer' s-devils " fifty years ago which rollers, 

 again, could never have been made fit for their present purposes, 

 without the discovery of that curious elastic compound out of which 

 they are cast. And then, on tracing the more remote antecedents, 

 he finds an ancestry of hand printing-presses, which, through genera- 

 tions, had been successively improved. Now, perhaps, he thinks he 

 understands the apparatus, considered as a sociological fact. Far 

 from it. Its multitudinous parts, which will work together only when 

 highly finished and exactly adjusted, came from machine-shops, 

 where there are varieties of complicated, highly-finished engines for 

 turning cylinders, cutting out wheels, planing bars, and so forth ; and 

 on the preexistence of these the existence of this printing-machine 

 depended. If he inquires into the history of these complex automatic 

 tools, he finds they have severally been, in the slow course of mechan- 

 ical progress, brought to their present perfection by the help of 



