INFLUENCE OF INVENTIONS ON CIVILIZATION. 483 



she can take care of 800 or more spindles and spin threads the aggre- 

 gate length of which would be more than 2,000 miles. 



On these machines cotton yarn has been spun so fine that one 

 pound of cotton would make a thread 335 miles long, and as a feat 

 threads have been so fine that a pound of cotton would reach nearly 

 5,000 miles ! 



To go back to our two cents' worth of cotton, which has been con- 

 verted into yarn. It is subjected to the action of several machines 

 before it reaches the loom, where it is converted into cloth. Weav- 

 ing, like spinning, is old, and some sort of machinery has always been 

 employed in the process, but the power-loom of our factories is a 

 modern invention. I sometimes think it is the most wonderful ma- 

 chine used. To make one yard of cloth, a shuttle carrying the filling- 

 thread is thrown across the web perhaps 1,500 times, at the rate of a 

 hundred crossings a minute. 



There are looms which weave cloth more than three yards wide. 

 There may be nearly 10,000 warp-threads in cloth of this width, and 

 5,000 filling-threads in a yard carried across the web at the rate of 

 nearly a hundred throws a minute. 



The art of printing has always been recognized as one of the great 

 inventions of man. It is over four hundred years old, but after its 

 first introduction very little improvement was made until the pi-esent 

 century. Since then it has presented a rapid succession of the highest 

 efforts of mechanical genius. I shall not attempt to follow their his- 

 tory or describe their character ; but it is interesting to know that 

 they have been made almost wholly by English or American inventors, 

 and that more has been done in this country than in England. The 

 wonder of modern printing is that it can be done so cheaply. You 

 have all seen the series of publications by the Harpers called the 

 " Franklin Square Library." I bought a copy for ten cents, the regu- 

 lar price. It contained thirty-six printed pages. I had the curiosity 

 to estimate the number of words on a pa^e and calculated it roughly 

 at 2,000. That would give for the whole book 72,000 words, all for 

 ten cents. Can you form a conception of the number of inventions 

 which has made such an achievement possible ? I think a mod- 

 ern daily newspaper is, however, one of the greatest wonders of 

 the age. 



I buy a morning paper, the " Boston Herald," for instance, for two 

 cents. I read it on my way to Boston in the horse-cars and abandon 

 it at the end of the trip, not because it is worthless, but because I have 

 obtained from it what I wanted and it will not pay to preserve it for 

 any other person or for future use. Now, what do I buy for my two 

 cents ? The physical thing that I buy is a sheet of paper and a cer- 

 tain amount of printers' ink impressed upon the surface of the paper 

 in the shapes of letters and words. It is a wonderful fact that man can 

 spread out the fibers of various vegetable substances into a thin, uni- 



