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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



parishes of London, with everything in its 

 place and nothing left out. On the side of 

 the learned, Scaliger read nothing which he 

 could not remember, and committed Homer 

 to memory in twenty-one days, and all the 

 Greek poets in three months. Like powers, 

 changing only the authors learned, were dis- 

 played by Bishop Saunderson, Euler, Leib- 

 nitz, Gilbert Wakefield, and Porson. The 

 same power is called into action in the ac- 

 quisition of languages ; and here we have 

 the instances of Crassus, who could try cases 

 and pronounce judgments in any of the dia- 

 lects of his Asiatic prcetorate ; Mithridates, 

 who administered the laws in all the lan- 

 guages of the twenty-two nations of his em- 

 pire ; Sir William Jones, who knew thirteen 

 languages well, and could read with com- 

 parative ease in thirty others ; John Leyden, 

 who had a good acquaintance with fifteen 

 languages ; George Borrow, who translated 

 prose and poetry from thirty languages ; Ed- 

 ward Henry Palmer, who could speak the 

 native tongue of every European nation, and 

 was so perfect a master of Arabic, Persian, 

 Hindustani, Turkish, and the language of 

 the gypsies, that even natives were some- 

 times deceived as to his nationality ; Vis- 

 count Strangford and Elihu Burritt, " the 

 learned blacksmith " ; Cardinal Mezzofanti, 

 who professed to be able to speak in " only 

 fifty-two" languages; Sir John Bowring, 

 who was much like him in gifts ; and Von 

 der Gabelentz, who " seems to have been 

 equally at home with the Suahelis, the 

 Samoyeds, the Hazaras, the Aimaks, the 

 Dyaks, the Dakotas, and the Kiriris ; who 

 could translate from Chinese into Manchu, 

 compile a grammar or correct the speech of 

 the inhabitauts of the Fiji Islands, New 

 Hebrides, Loyalty Islands, or New Cale- 

 donia." 



Mobility of Labor. Discussing in the 

 British Association the effects on mobility 

 of labor of the introduction of machinery 

 and the tendency to production on a large 

 scale, Mr. H. Llewellen Smith defined mo- 

 bility as the free economic device of employ- 

 ment, by change either of occupation or of 

 place. It is not the same as movement, nor 

 is the one measured by the other. It is 

 measured by the extent to which a set of 

 workers engaged in a particular process, or 



in making a particular article, would or would 

 not suffer economically by a change in the 

 demand for that process or that article. 

 There is, besides, "initial mobility," or the 

 free effective choice of occupation at the 

 outset. This is effected by the localization 

 of industries and the tendency to heredity, 

 which again is strongest in domestic trades 

 and weakest in factories. The general re- 

 sult reached by discussion is, that modern 

 changes tend to divide up a process of manu- 

 facture into a number of detail processes of 

 which one man performs only one, but the 

 various members of the group of workers 

 producing a particular article become less 

 and less specialized with regard to that arti- 

 cle, and their range of mobility, which is 

 narrowed as regards power of interchange 

 among themselves, is widened as regards 

 power of interchange with workers engaged 

 in corresponding processes of other trades. 

 Machinery often tends to facilitate this in- 

 terchange by transferring different manu- 

 factures into different groupings of nearly 

 identical detail process. Hence, while divid- 

 ing up employments on the one hand, ma- 

 chinery reintegrates them on fresh lines. 

 Thus the boundaries of trades and indus- 

 tries are shifting and industries are regroup- 

 ing themselves. Apprenticeship and trade 

 customs are affected. There is a simulta- 

 neous tendency to shorten the time neces- 

 sary to learn a particular process, and so to 

 increase the ease (though not always the 

 practical opportunity) of interchange among 

 different processes of the same trade. 



Knbies and Sapphires in Siam. The 



gem-mines of Siam are at Krung, Krat, and 

 Phailin, points or districts dependent on the 

 seaport of Chantabun. They are shortly to 

 be leased ; but at present the only condition 

 required for entering the mines is the pay- 

 ment of a small fee to the head man of the 

 district. The digger's first object is to dis- 

 cover a layer of soft, yellowish sand, in 

 which both rubies and sapphires are depos- 

 ited. This stratum lies at depths varying 

 from a few inches to twenty feet, on a bed 

 of subsoil in which no precious stones are 

 found. A pit is dug, and the soil removed 

 is taken to a neighboring canal or stream, 

 where it is mixed with water and passed 

 through an ordinary hand - sieve. In his 



