3 o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Go to Troy. One man invented nearly all the machinery on 

 which the laundry-work is established, and all the laundries are 

 called " Troy laundries/' Then, since the laundry is the necessary 

 adjunct of the shirt-factory, Troy and its neighborhood have 

 become the center of the shirt, collar, and cuff manufacture. In 

 this art the cutting and making of the shirt have been so perfected 

 that it costs less to make the shirt than it does to do the laundry- 

 work upon it and get it ready for sale ; while the women who 

 operate the sewing and ironing machinery earn higher wages than 

 even your best weavers, because they make the shirts at the 

 lowest cost. It is only the woman who sews poorly who is a poor 

 sewing- woman. 



Go to Foxborough, Mass. the whole population makes straw 

 hats ; over at Taunton and in that neighborhood, tacks and 

 brads ; down in Connecticut, around Meriden and Waterbury, 

 all the brass-work of special kinds. Go to Leicester Hill, the 

 important occupation is making cards for your factories, with 

 some offshoots in Worcester. Even a single art divides up. Lynn 

 makes fine boots and shoes for women ; Brockton, common boots 

 for men ; Spencer, heavy boots for men. 



The Dundee orange marmalade is another instance. Why 

 should orange marmalade be made in Scotland, and not in Spain, 

 where the oranges grow ? I think the immediate benefit to the 

 people in Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia might be greater in the 

 introduction of the marmalade manufacture rather than in that 

 of the cotton fabrics. The capital of a single cotton-mill would 

 establish a great many marmalade-factories, and, like the eggs, 

 there might be no end to the consumption. 



Now, for one reason or another, the art of spinning cotton 

 centered in Lancashire, England, first starting in and around 

 Manchester. It stays in Lancashire. Manchester remains the 

 center of the trade, but the trend of the spindles is away from 

 Manchester proper. The spinners have for some years built 

 nearly all the new mills at Oldham and other towns, seven or 

 eight hundred feet above the sea-level, on the crest of the ridge 

 beyond which the moors stretch away to Scotland. They may not 

 have known why they went there, but it is the point where the 

 relative humidity of the atmosphere is most constant. The rain- 

 fall is only about half what it is in Massachusetts, but the rela- 

 tive humidity of the atmosphere is very high, and you are always 

 looking out for a shower. The dry, bad days for spinning are 

 when the wind is from the east that is, the dry wind in England 

 coming over the land. 



They are building a ship-canal to Manchester at an enormous 

 expense, estimated at ten million pounds, or fifty million dollars, 

 in order to save the railway freight on cotton from Liverpool to 



