April 27, 1900.] 



iSCIENCE 



659 



5. Bulimus ( ) ventrosus Fer. 



6. Helicodiscus lineatus Say. 



7. Cochlicopa luhrica Miili. 



(= Ferrussaccia subcylindrica Linn.) 

 of Europe, and 



8. Ostrea Virginica Gmelin. 



9. Mya arenaria Linn. 



10. Modiola plicatula'L&m. 



11. Uromlpinx einereus Say. 



12. Crepidula convexa var. glauca Say. 

 of the Atlantic seaboard. 



With the exception of numbers 2 and 7 

 examples of the foregoing have been placed 

 in the National Museum. 



EoBERT E. C. Steaens. 



Los Angeles, Cal. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. 



MANUAL AND MECHANICAL PRODUCTIVITY.* 



The report of the United States Commissioner 

 of Labor, Mr. Carroll D. Wright, recently 

 issued, on ' Hand and Machine Labor, ' * like 

 all our reports from that source, is rich in facts 

 and data. This report has, naturally, in conse- 

 quence of its iatrinsio importance, as well its 

 admirable form and wealth of information, at- 

 tracted much attention. Mr. Wright has him- 

 self given a resum6 of the work in the March 

 issue of Ounton's Magazine ; London Engineer- 

 ing and the Scientific American devote space to 

 a summary and we now find in the February 

 number of the Bulletin de la Societe d' Encourage- 

 ment, jjour V Industrie nationale, an elaborate 

 article by the distinguished French writer, M. 

 E. Levasseur, in which the abstract of Mr. 

 Wright's report constitutes the pi&ce de resist- 

 ance. The facts illustrated in this remarkable 

 document are, in substance, the following : 



The comparison made is, in general, with the 

 methods of the earlier times, antedating the 

 present system of machine-production in which 

 the hands and even the brains of the workmen 

 are reinforced and made enormously more pro- 

 ductive by the employment of machinery of 

 great power, activity, accuracy and endurance. 

 It is the comparison of the work and produc- 



* Thirteenth Annual Report ; Washington Gov't 

 Print. 1899. 2 Vols. Pp. 1597. 



tivity of the days of unaided manual labor of 

 the last century with the production of our own 

 time of labor-aiding machinery and of industrial 

 organization. The real progress described, 

 surprising as it may seem, has actually taken 

 place mainly in the last half century, and in 

 large proportion since about 1870, the date of 

 initiative assumed in Mr. Wells' famous ' Re- 

 cent Economic Changes.' Within this period, 

 the changes have been studied in eighty-eight 

 principal industries and about seven hundred 

 subsidiary lines. All the data are tabulated in 

 convenient form and the presentation thus made 

 is most admirably adapted for the purposes of 

 the economist, the engineer and the manufac- 

 turer interested in the principles of economics 

 controlling his art. 



The general deductions are that, while the 

 number of operations in the production of each 

 article has usually considerably increased, and 

 while the machine with its attendant turns out 

 enormously larger product than the unaided 

 workman, the time required for the production 

 of a given amount of product has quite as ex- 

 traordinarily decreased ; the costs of product 

 have proportionally decreased ; the market has 

 been enormously expanded and, unexpected 

 but true, the number of workmen has very 

 greatly increased in each industry thus aided 

 and their wages have followed the upward 

 trend of production. Thus, lower prices of 

 product, and larger production with rising wages 

 for more workmen employed, have been conse- 

 quent upon the work of the inventor and the 

 genius of the ' entrepreneur,' as the economists, 

 curiously, often denominate the manufacturer 

 and the organizer of industries. Invention has 

 immensely augmented, rather than displaced, 

 labor in every manufacturing industry ; not 

 even excepting agriculture, where the inventor 

 has supplied the mower and the reaper, the 

 seeder and threshing machine to increase the 

 effectiveness of the manual worker ten times 

 over. 



M. Levasseur, in his extended study of such 

 comparisons of the work of the unaided hand 

 with the work of that machine-assisted, traces 

 the history of the introduction of inventions 

 and machinery, with the gradual rise and 

 more gradual fall of the ignorant prejudice of 



