INFLUENCE OF LABOR-SAVING MACHINERY. 469

been as far as the aborigines of this continent (except the Mexicansand Peruvians) had advanced. The interval between the metallicspade, the axe, and the hoe, and any implement of husbandrywhich they had made, was, in the progress of invention, immense.The invention of the plough and the cart, and the application ofthe strength of animals to agriculture, and to the carrying ofburthens, was another most important step in advance. Thesewere arts of the first necessity, they supplied the primitive wantsof life, and civilization kept an exact pace with their invention.

The first garments, too, seem to have been the bark of trees,and the skins of wild animals caught in the chase ; consequentlyclothing was too scanty and too filthy to serve the purposes ofhealth and decency, to say nothing of comfort and ornament.At length, the distaff and the loom were invented, and mankindmade fresh advances in the career of improvement. Permanentmeans of subsistence, a sufficiency of clothing, and settled habi-tations, have almost, if not quite, always preceded any consid-erable advances in civilization.

Again, almost any one of the arts might be taken, and itshistory would be seen to keep an even pace with the improve-ment of mankind. The history of the working of iron, for instance,and applying it to the purposes of life, would afford the mostabundant and instructive materials to this effect, if my limits per-mitted me to employ them. In truth, in tracing the history ofour race, there is no clearer index, by which to mark the progressof civilization in any given era, than the extent and variety ofthe uses to which this most valuable of the metals was, at thattime, applied. And its use is extending at this day more rapid-ly, perhaps, than at any previous period. Within a very fewyears, iron looms, iron roofs, iron steam-boats, and iron roads(railways) have been introduced.

But I must not dismiss this copious part of the subject, with-out enlarging still further. The first person who saw the descentof water to the ocean, saw, in such descent, the elements ofwater power; and the first person who saw water boiling, saw, inthe expansive force of the steam, the elements of steam power.But there was a wide interval between the first observation of theexistence of water power, and even the first of the successive