New Departures at Home.

But great as has been the progress of foreign countries and keen as is their rivalry with us in many important branches, we have no hesitation in stating our conviction, page 38 which we believe to be shared by continental manufacturers themselves, that, taking the state of the arts of construction and the staple manufactures as a whole, our people still maintain their position at the head of the industrial world. Not only has nearly every important machine and process employed in manufactures been either invented or perfected in this country in the past, but it is not too much to say that most of the prominent new industrial departures of modern times are due to the inventive power and practical skill of our countrymen. Among these are the great invention of Bessemer for the production of steel in enormous quantities, by which alone, or with its modification by Thomas and Gilchrist, enabling the commonest description of iron to be used for the purpose, steel is now obtained at one-tenth of the price of twenty years ago; the Weldon, Hargreaves, and Deacon processes, which have revolutionized the alkali trade; the manufacture of aniline colors by Perkin; the new processes in the production of silk fabrics by Lister; the numerous applications of water pressure to industrial purposes by Armstrong; the Nasmyth steam hammer; the compound steam engine as a source of great economy of fuel; and the practical application of electricity to laud and submarine telegraphy by Cooke, Wheatstone, Thomson, and others.

Machinery made in this country is more extensively exported than at any former period. The best machines constructed abroad are, in the main, and with the exceptions which we have named, made, with slight, if any, modifications, after English models. A large proportion of the power looms exhibited and used in the continental weaving schools lias been imported from this country. In the manufacture of iron and steel we stand preeminent, and we are practically the naval architects of the world. Our technical journals, such as those of the Institutes of Civil and Mechanical Engineers and of the lron and Steel Institute, are industriously searched and their contents assimilated abroad.

In those textile manufactures in which other nations have hitherto excelled us, as in soft, all-wool goods, we are gaining ground. We saw at Bradford merinos manufactured and finished in this country which would bear comparison in texture and in color with the best of those of the French looms and dye houses, and in the delicate fabrics of Nottingham and Macclesfield (thanks, in great measure, to their local schools of art) we no longer rely on France for designs.

In art manufactures proper, notably in porcelain, earthenware, and glass, as also in decorative furniture, our productions are of conspicuous excellence. It is possible that this may be due in a certain degree to the employment, in some branches, of skilled workers trained in foreign countries, and we cannot do otherwise than acknowledge the preeminence, in the main, of our French neighbors in design as applied to decorative work or disregard the efforts which they are making to maintain that preeminence, and those made in Belgium and Italy to emulate them.