though they are comparatively insignificant. These are zinc, generally found with or near the lead in Northumberland and North Wales, although our chief supplies come from Belgium; manganese, found in Devonshire and Cornwall, though Spain sends us most of what we require; besides a small quantity of sulphur ore, arsenic, bismuth, and ochre; and a still more minute quantity of gold, found, though not to any profitable amount, in the quartz mountains of Caernarvonshire and Merionethshire.

Besides these, the main industries connected with the mining and smelting of our principal metals, there are some others which should be mentioned ere we pass to the subject of hardwares. Brass, the most important metallic substance after iron, is a combination of copper with either tin, zinc, or lead, according to the quality required; and brass founding and casting give employment to a large body of people (about 25,000) in all the varied branches of brass work. Birmingham and Bristol are perhaps the two towns which may be said to be the headquarters of the brass trade; but in point of fact, when we consider the many subsidiary occupations included under that term-such as plumbers' work, brass wire and sheathing for ships' bottoms, tubes, lamps, gasfittings, house furnishing, etc.—there is scarcely a place of any size where the brass trade is not represented in some shape or other. It may be mentioned that brass casting and founding is an unhealthy occupation, on account of the deleterious metallic fumes given off in the process, principally those of oxide of

The manufacture of tin plate is largely carried on in England, and employs a great number of people. Tin plate is really nothing more than thin sheets of iron coated with tin, and the principal seats of the trade are, therefore, naturally found near the ironworking centres. Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire in South Wales, and the neighbourhoods of Birmingham and Wolverhampton, contain the majority of the tinplate works, a large part of the production of which is sent to Liverpool, to be shipped to the United States, the best customers that we have.

HARDWARES AND FINISHED METAL TRADES.

THE hardware trades form a most important group of British industries, including a very comprehensive variety of occupations, giving employment to vast bodies of people, and impressing whole towns and districts with the peculiarities of that special branch for which they are celebrated. Under this head we shall discuss such articles as nails, locks, pins, needles, cutlery, steel pens, chains, buttons, screws, wire, cheap jewellery, electro-plate, the great majority of which result in the production of things very insignificant and small in themselves, but of enormous value when we come to think of the quantities produced and their use to mankind. For instance, what is the value of a nail, a pin, a button,

or a steel pen? They are scarcely worth the picking up from off the ground-and yet the amount of money that is spent in their production, and in their purchase afterwards, is almost incredible, and shows us the oft repeated fact, that there is no article, however trifling in itself, that has not its recognised value, and that does not fill its proper place in civilisation. Nails, though simple and rough looking things, are yet made in very few places in Great Britain, and the bulk of them are turned out in only two or three districts. They consist of the hand-made and the machine-made nails, the latter of which, though not always the better nail of the two, is fast displacing the hand-made, by reason of its greater cheapness and quicker rate of production. Machinery invariably has these effects. The hand-made nail trade is located almost entirely in the Black Country of South Staffordshire and Worcestershire, where the two counties-both abounding in coal and iron-run into one another. Dudley, Cradley, and Halesowen are the great nail making towns, and there is another colony of nailers at Bromsgrove, a little farther off in Worcestershire, and also at Belper in Derbyshire. The first named district, where the majority of nailers are employed, is a miserable one-dirty, wretched, and uncivilised, and the nailers themselves are perhaps one of the roughest and lowest classes of our population. Men, women and children (and especially the last two) work from morning to night at their anvils for very small earnings, and altogether their life is of the hardest and most cheerless. Machine-made nails are produced in factories in different places, such as Birmingham,

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Wolverhampton, Leeds, Newcastle, and Newport in Monmouthshire, and the workers in these factories are under far better conditions than the hand-makers. Another branch of this trade is the making of chains and anchors, which is mainly done by hand at Dudley and Cradley. The chain makers are but a little above the nailers in position, but the anchor makers take a much higher rank as skilled workmen.

Locks are more of a local trade than even nailmaking, for they are produced within a very small compass in Walsall, Wolverhampton and Willenhall, all South Staffordshire manufacturing towns close to each other. What is more curious still, each one of these places is noted for a particular kind of lock, the Wolverhampton makers producing kinds quite different to those of Walsall or Brewood. Over 7000 people are employed in the trade, which is carried on mostly at home by men who have risen from workmen to be masters in a small way. One feature in the lock trade is worth mentioning, and that is their excessive cheapness, the common sorts being made for 6 d. per dozen. Walsall, it should be stated, is also the principal centre of a very large trade in bits, spurs, bridles, and saddles, and the numerous ironmongeries that are connected with horse clothing.

Pins are made principally at Birmingham, though there are manufactories also at Bristol, Dublin, Warrington in Lancashire, and the little town of Stroud in Gloucestershire. Machinery has brought pin-making to such perfection, that comparatively few persons are now employed in the trade: for whereas it took fourteen sets of workers to produce a pin, now it

only requires two or three. This is not the case, however, with needles, which from their peculiar qualities and temper, are obliged to be made very much by hand, and have to pass through a great variety of processes. Redditch, a small town in Worcestershire, is the chief seat of the needle and fish hook manufacture, although a certain class of needles is made also at Hathersage, a small village amongst the hills of Derbyshire, and to a small extent at Sheffield. There seems to be no special reason why Redditch should have become so exclusively the centre of this trade, save that the German needle makers, who imported the knowledge of it into England, settled down here by chance; and so the industry flourished, until now Redditch needles and hooks are celebrated over the world.

Cutlery is a very busy and important branch of the hardware trades, employing between 40,000 and 50,000 people, of whom the majority belong to Sheffield, Wolverhampton and Birmingham. The two latter towns, however, are more occupied with edged-tool making, while Sheffield deals mostly with the finer kinds of tools-saws, files, forks, scissors, and surgical instruments. Sheffield knives are known throughout the whole globe, not only in civilised countries, but also in the savage wilds of Africa; but the English reputation for tools has been rather undermined of late years in foreign markets by Germans, and most of all, Americans, who are also great tool manufacturers, and particularly of those for agricultural purposes. Sheffield is situated very picturesquely, and rather peculiarly, on the hills overlooking the valley of the Don,