310 INDUSTRIAL MUSEUMS IN THEIR 



tible, chiefly by mechanical treatment, into articles of higher utilitarian 

 value. Take as examples the difference between sheep's wool and York- 

 shire broadcloth, or between the silkworm's cocoon and imperial velvet. 



3. There is a third large class of substances, which are neither raw nor 

 workable materials, but rather serve to modify both — such, for example, 

 as the iodine and bromine which the photographer uses, the chlorine 

 and alkalies applied by the bleacher, the colours used by the dyer, the 

 oils employed by the leather-dresser. 



Now one-half at least of all the ships and waggons of the world are 

 continually occupied in transporting from point to point over the earth's 

 surface the raw, workable, and modifying materials of mineral, vege- 

 table, and animal origin, on and with which our manufacturers exercise 

 their skilL One great service accordingly which an industrial museum 

 may render, is to enable those whom it concerns to detect and distin- 

 guish from each other, the various important raw, workable, and modi- 

 fying materials with which industrial art works. A collection, there- 

 fore, of all the more prominent characteristic or typical utilitarian mate- 

 rials, so arranged that the public might readily understand their nature, 

 could not but be of signal service. Consider how the case stands at pre- 

 sent. No systematic effort is made by our merchants to search the earth 

 for its liberal treasures. The noblest, as men speak, and the vilest of 

 things, gold aud guano, are stumbled on by chance, and gathered at 

 haphazard ; and this whether they occur at our own door, or at our anti- 

 podes. With a kind of mad patience we go submissively year after 

 year to the same cotton land, and sugar land, or tea land. If it shall 

 please Providence to make cotton, sugar, and tea plants grow elsewhere 

 than in those lands, we of course shall go to the new regions, but we 

 must wait till these are revealed. We are reckless and daring enough 

 in unceasingly scouring strange lands and seas, but of what avail is all 

 this if we only guess at the value of the strange objects which we en- 

 counter ! Charles Dickens has, however, undesignedly, profoundly 

 satirised this folly of ours in his account of Captain Cuttle's endeavour 

 to keep the shop of his friend the philososophical-instrument maker. 

 All went well till a customer inquired for a particular instrument. 

 Whether it was one of the many strange pieces of apparatus consigned 

 to his care, the captain did not know. And as his customer, on being 

 asked if he would know what he wanted if he saw it, replied in the 

 negative, the transaction came to an end. We are like the captain's cus- 

 tomer. We go forth in hundreds every year, as pilgrims over the earth, 

 to seek, as we say, our jortune, as if all the seeking were on our side, and 

 we should certainly know our fortune if we saw it. And all the while 

 it may be our fortune, like a lost bride, is seeking us, and too often, 

 like Gabriel and Evangeline in Longfellow's sad story, we pass each 

 other in the dark, and all unconscious of the fact, bid farewell for ever. 



How many of the young men who visit foreign countries or the 

 colonies, bent on commercial enterprise, could tell gold from mica or 



