379 
varied accounts of themselves that the independence of 
the testimony cannot be doubted. That its work is 
popular is indicated by the wish expressed by one of 
them that “there should bea National Bureau.” Factory 
legislation is printed in it (even 1884 legislation, although 
the printer’s date is 1883!); the factory inspector has 
become a popular institution, and much testimony is 
borne to the smaller hardship of factory laws uniformly 
than loosely enforced. The more educated and more 
prosperous workmen are, the more ambitious and aspiring 
they become, and we seem on the eve of their blending 
with their masters when complaints are made, as here, 
that many of their fellow-workmen are satisfied with ove/y 
66 shillings a week wages; and a caution is held forth to 
such not to spend their money in foolishly aping the 
rich, 
Yet, though the teacher here is no longer one of the 
fatherly governments of the old world using his paternal 
authority for the good of a rather refractory son, yet the 
teaching is most satisfactorily similar. Drunkenness 
could not be set forth as the prevailing cause of pauper- 
ism among the men or the evil of a lack of artistic taste 
among the masters in more vivid or unqualified terms 
than they arehere. The sad combination of progress and 
poverty is bewailed, but we fear that co-operation urged 
here as its remedy too much overlooks the control of 
fashion and its effect upon supply and demand. A most 
practical power put in the hands of this Bureau is that of 
examining the accounts of co-operative companies. 
Any five members of a company may require such an 
examination. 
The principal industries of New Jersey are taken, and, 
after full statistics of their amount, prosperity and pro- 
spects. with the wages earned by each class of workers, 
an interesting account is given, commencing with a short 
history of the methods, improvements, and general posi- 
tion of the trade in the United States and in other 
countries, and their experience compared. Any one 
casting about for an occupation in which he could take a 
satisfactory part would find in this “ Book of Trades” 
much to supply the information first required, and 
much to encourage him. Among them we find a 
review of the silk trade, which, under the gis of 60 
per cent. duty, has made the wealthy city of Paterson ; 
of glass-making, which at present does not extend much 
beyond window glass and bottles ; of the cultivation of 
sorghum, still in its infancy in New Jeysey ; and of the pot- 
tery trade—after its account of which it performs the very 
useful function of a publication like this of appealing to 
such a trade to take the steps necessary for raising their 
standard of art. An appeal is made, not from a Goyern- 
ment department, or from an interfering cl7gwve as South 
Kensington is occasionally regarded as being, but by the 
organ of his late fellow-workers, that the maker of one of 
those large fortunes so common in America will, for his 
country’s glory and their help, found a technical school ; 
while hands are led to feel that intellectual training and not 
mechanical energy alone is wanted. The idea is shown 
here also to be making its way that the school should be 
made the basis of technical as well as of mental training ; 
that the dextrous use of the body should form part of the 
school, as well as of the playground, teaching. More than 
this, it is felt that they should not be two so distinct 
branches of education as in past days, and that the mem- 
bers and muscles of the body, as well as the brain, should 
receive elementary instruction at the school, and that the 
former should be placed more deliberately under the 
control of the latter. It is felt in America that 
“* The cultured mind 
The skilful hand” 
ought naturally to go together, and not that one should 
be the usual mark of the absence of the other ; that, there- 
fore, a mechanic should not mean little more than a 
machine, but a mechanician, able to understand, make or 
NATORE 
| dugust 20, 1885 
repair the giant body that is using its limbs to save his 
exertions, and therefore a man more on a level with other 
men whose time has been given to the cultivation of their 
minds only, and more justified in insisting upon their 
equality with the latter. It is urged in this Report that 
elementary technical knowledge valuable to all the New 
Jersey trades may be given in ordinary schools; that 
technical learning is popular, frequently most so to boys 
who are slow at books; and that successful manual occu- 
pation improves the morality of the worst of such boys. 
A very favourable notice of the Reformatory school at 
Coldwater; a sad tale of jail arrangements, and of 
methods of keeping the poor, all lead to discussions of 
economical difficulties felt long ago in England, not by 
any means avoided in America, and showing how little 
forms of government can modify human nature. A more 
hopeful view of that is afforded by the account, illustrated 
with three engravings and three plans, of a working-man’s_ 
Institute at Millville. At this one establishment, which 
seems to have cost little more than 4000/., are combined, 
besides large grounds used for field sports, bicycling, &c., 
a gymnasium and baths in charge of a barber in the base- 
ment, while on the ground floor are a conversation room 
hung round with maps and supplied with musical instru- 
ments on which performances are given, where also lec- 
tures are delivered, discussions held, and games of skill 
played. Side by side with it is a library and reading-room. 
Up stairs are four class-rooms and a large hall seating 500 
persons, besides a gallery over the rear half of it. At the 
other end of it is a stage with two dressing-rooms and 
other necessary adjuncts. This room is used on Sundays 
as well as on weekdays by various societies—a choral 
class among others—and is a convenient source of 
revenue. 
It is impossible to lay down our Report without feeling 
that if each department of its work is by itself of little 
importance, it will doubtless be a useful agent in making 
every inhabitant of New Jersey and of the United States 
a more intelligent worker at his trade or surveyor of the 
economies around him. 
PIERCING THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA* 
if pee years ago the work of cutting through the 
Panama isthmus had barely commenced. The 
equatorial forests on the neck of land, 73 kilometres 
long, which marked the axis of the future interoceanic 
canal, had hardly been laid bare. The traveller who 
followed the primitive road met here and there some 
groups of cabins, with roofs of branches on poles, marking 
the site of a sounding or the improvised dwellings of 
a portion of the operators. Culebra, Emperador, 
Corosita, and Gamboa, which are now full of activity, 
were then almost desert, and on the coast of Colon alone 
the excavator traced in the marshy plains of Gatun his 
great track. The contrast to-day is great: a long file of 
workshops covers the space between the Atlantic and the 
Pacific. Twenty thousand workmen toil on the Cor- 
dillera, making the deep cutting for the canal. Side by 
side with this army, another more powerful army of 
colossal machines, excavators, dredges, locomotives, 
waggons, all the materials for transport, thousands of 
pairs of wheels, hundreds of kilometres of rails, moun- 
tains of coal, and shiploads of dynamite. Among the 
twenty-five workshops of the peninsula the attention is 
chiefly attracted to two points: the great rocky cutting at 
Culebra, which is to penetrate to a depth of 120 metres 
into the Cordillera, and the dam of the Chagres at Gam- 
boa. At Culebra the previsions of M. de Lesseps have 
been realised: the mountainous mass which the canal 
will traverse is, for the most part, composed of rocks 
which are not very hard; repeated soundings by means 
of diamond perforators have shown that down to a 
2 Abstract from La Nature. 
