54 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



To describe what this society has done, to use the language of its 

 presiding officer, at its centennial anniversary in 1853, would be to 

 relate the history of arts, manufactures and inventions, from 1754 

 to the present time. There is scarcely a branch of the industrial 

 arts that has not felt its vivifying influence. Before 1790 its re- 

 wards had effected great improvements in agriculture, especially in 

 the cultivation of hemp. They led to the introduction of bone manure 

 to the analysis of soils, to improved agricultural implements, to 

 better modes of irrigation and to many valuable improvements in 

 manufactures and in the mechanic arts; and its labors have since 

 been continued, embracing a very wide field of operations, such as 

 the improvement of British fisheries, the breaking up of monopo- 

 lies, and in effecting the repeal of many laws injurious to trade, 

 and commerce, and the enactment of others of a beneficial character. 

 In 1760 it offered a premium for the invention of a machine that 

 would spin six threads of wool, flax, silk or cotton — cotton being 

 then spun only by hand. In four years after, Hargrave, a poor 

 workman in a cotton-factory in Lancashire, produced a machine that 

 would spin eleven, which, improved by Arkwright, resulted in the spin- 

 ning Jenny, an invention which, together with Watt's improvement 

 in the steam-engine about the same time, revolutionized the whole 

 manufacturing system of England, and made it the enormous source 

 of wealth and power it has become. When the society was organ- 

 ized in 1754, England imported but three million lbs of cotton an- 

 nually. In half a century after, she imported annually 130,000,000. 

 One of the earliest prizes ofl'ered by the society was for the best 

 specimens of carpets, the manufacture of which was, at that time 

 so trifling as scarcely to be deserving of notice ; England is now the 

 seat of the great factories of Kidderminster, Axminster and Wilton. 

 At the same time it offered another prize for porcelain. The best 

 fabrics then were brown or black pans, known as Staffordshire 

 ware. In eighty years England's exports of the finest porcelain, 

 embracing every variety and form, exceeded in value half a million 

 of pounds sterling annually. 



In 17G0 it gave an exliibition of the works of British artists, the 

 first attempt at an exhibit ion of the kind, and wliich led to the annual 

 exhibitions afterwards instituted by the Royal Society. In the 

 following year it opened, and has since continued, a yearly exhibi- 

 tion of new inventions, with a person in attendance to explain them. 

 The Society of Arts has now an annual income of $10,000. It has 

 a library, a museum of models, a building of its own, and has ex- 

 pended over half a million of dollars in rewards and premiums. It 

 has put forth 50 volumes of its transactions, and for the last ten 



