Popular Science Lectures. 167 
human hand. Cunningly devised and skilfully arranged 
pieces of metal are now made to move in one harmonious 
whole, as if endowed with intelligence, and the result is 
an enormous gain in precision and rapidity of production 
with consequently greater cheapness. Marked progress 
has taken place in all kinds of machinery. The old 
steam engine is a clumsy arrangement compared with that 
of to-day, with its easy motion and lines in which the 
enthusiastic engineer sees as much beauty as does the 
sailor in a well designed hull. The spinning machines 
with their thousands of spindles, and the power loom 
giving out miles of woven fabric are far in advance of 
the simpler hand-worked machines of the earlier part of 
the century — and to improved processes in printing, for 
which we are in large measure indebted to the inventive 
genius of our American cousins, we owe that supply of 
cheap books and newspapers which is one of the 
characteristics of these modern days. Those who have 
had an opportunity of comparing the old press with which 
the Times newspaper of earlier days was worked off, 
with the huge presses now used by all the leading 
papers with vertical cylinders of type and automatic 
processes of various kinds, requiring the care of but a few 
attendants, must be struck with the wonderful difference 
in this respe6t between " then and now." 
I need not attempt to enumerate the various ways in 
which other machinery has been improved, and the points 
of difference between the old and the new, nor do 
more than allude to the increase in production and 
decrease in prices which have been brought about by 
means of machinery — and yet there were often riots and 
bloodshed in attempts to prevent the introduction of 
