INVENTION AND INDUSTRY AT THE SOUTH. 379 



worthless "results" due to it are charged up against tlie far- 

 reaching logical principle itself and have given rise to a counter 

 tendency that is no more creditable. The old cry, " Stick to the 

 facts ! " simply means that the danger of going wrong increases 

 very rapidly as one passes by inference beyond known facts, 

 especially when these are few in number. Perhaps the greatest 

 boon that could fall to biological science would be such a 

 thorough study of the history of the science by its own votaries 

 that they would learn beyond the power of forgetting the fact 

 that speculation alone is worse than useless, and that reasoning 

 with verification is indispensable. 



INVENTION AND INDUSTRY AT THE SOUTH. 



BY BAETON H. WISE. 



THE antagonism between the plantation interest on the one 

 hand, and commerce and manufacturing on the other, was 

 pointed out at an early period of our history. The institution 

 of negro slave labor repelled white labor and immigration from 

 the South; and while the North received continuous waves of 

 population, and the growth of commerce and manufacturing 

 caused cities to spring up in every direction, the South remained 

 a sparsely settled section, almost purely agricultural. These con- 

 ditions have been attributed in part to climatic influences, but 

 this theory hardly holds when we reflect that what we call the 

 South is not only part of the Northern continent and in the tem- 

 perate zone, but that its southernmost point is seventeen hundred 

 miles north of the equator. So much did the increase of popula- 

 tion in the South, however, lag behind that of the North, that in 

 1850 there were in the former only IS'93 inhabitants to the square 

 mile, to 45'8 in the latter. Not only could capital at the South 

 be more profitably invested in lands and negroes than in manu- 

 facturing, but in addition efforts at establishing manufacturing 

 plants were unsuccessful, as negro labor was not suited to it. 



In considering the subject of inventions at the South, we can 

 not afford to overlook these facts, nor can we overestimate the 

 depressing effect that negro labor was calculated to produce, 

 though indirectly, upon the inventive faculties of the people. In 

 the North every circumstance tended toward the encouragement 

 of manufacturing, and among a people who, as a consequence, 

 were accustomed to the use of machinery of all sorts, the invent- 

 ive faculties were stimulated to their utmost. 



In the South these conditions were exactly reversed, and noth- 

 ing tended to the growth of manufacturing or of an urban popu- 



