drawings of the methods of construction
alluded to in the lecture.]

BY C. J. H. WOODBURY, BOSTON, MASS.

The great factories of the textile industries in this country are
fashioned after methods peculiarly adapted to the purposes for which
they are designed, particularly as regards the most convenient placing
of machinery, the distribution of power, the relation of the several
processes to each other in the natural sequence of manufacture, and
the arrangement of windows securing the most favorable lighting. The
floors and roofs embody the most economical distribution of material,
and the walls furnish examples of well known forms of masonry
originating with this class of buildings.

These features of construction have not been produced by a stroke of
genius on the part of any one man. There has been no Michael Angelo,
no Sir Christopher Wren, whose epitaph bids the reader to look around
for a monument; but the whole has been a matter of slow, steady
growth, advancing by hair's breadth; and, as the result of continual
efforts to adapt means to ends, an inorganic evolution has been
effected, resulting in the survival of the fittest, and literally
pushing the weaker to the wall.

This advance in methods has, like all inventions, resulted in the
impairment of invested capital. There are hundreds of mill buildings,
the wonder of their day, now used for storage because they cannot be
employed to sufficient advantage in manufacturing purposes to compete
with the facilities furnished by mills of later design. Thus their
owners have been compelled to erect new buildings, and, as far as the
original purpose of manufacturing is concerned, to abandon their old
mills.

In the case of a certain cotton mill built about thirty years ago, and
used for the manufacture of colored goods of fancy weave, the owners
added to the plant by constructing a one story mill, which proved to
be peculiarly adapted to this kind of manufacture, by reason of added
stability, better light, and increased facilities for transferring the
stock in process of manufacture; and they soon learned not only that
the old mill could not compete with the new one, but that they could
not afford to run it at any price; the annual saving in the cost of
gas, as measured by the identical meter used to measure the supply to
the old mill, being six per cent. on the cost of the new mill.

In another instance, one of two cordage mills burned, and a new mill
of o