Page:What is technology? (Wilson).djvu/26

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collection, preparation, and reduction of native metallic ores, and the economic applications of the metals and their alloys.

A Fifth will be that of building materials—stone, brick, lime, mortar, cement, wood, and the like.

A Sixth will include those ancient and graceful industrial arts, the art of the potter and that of the glass-blower.

A Seventh, ramifying widely, will include the textile manufactures, and the arts related to cotton, linen, silk, wool, and other fibres. Under this, apart from the beautiful mechanical processes of carding, spinning, knitting, weaving, and the like, will come the important chemical arts of bleaching, dyeing, and calico-printing; and the transition will be direct to that pre-eminent industrial art, paper-making, which, in its turn, will lead to the consideration of the Graphic Arts—drawing, printing, wood-cutting, engraving, lithography, glass-etching and staining, water-colour, oil-fresco, encaustic, and other kinds of painting; the properties of drawing materials, canvas, wood, metal, stucco; the chemistry of inks, pigments, varnishes, and the like.

An Eighth division will include the arts relating to food, omitting, except indirectly. Agriculture, to which Professor John Wilson will do all justice, and embracing the manufacture of sugar, of starch, of gum, of animal jelly, of extract of meat; the preservation of vegetable and animal substances from decay; the arts of cooking, baking, brewing, wine-making, and distilling.

A Ninth will include the arts related to animal products, employed otherwise than for food, embracing furs, feathers, bristles, horns, bones, teeth, shells, etc.; and include the manufacture of size, glue, gelatine, parchment, leather, and the crafts of the shoe-maker, hat-maker, saddler, book-binder, gold-beater, comb-maker, brush-maker, ivory-carver, button-maker, and many another ancient guild.

And, without multiplying divisions further, let me consign to a Tenth miscellaneous one, the manufacture of the mineral acids, alkalis, and other largely used chemical re-agents, as well as all the industrial arts for which a place has not been found in the preceding sections.

The programme thus slightly sketched, touches on every side, upon subjects discussed by other professors; but it only touches upon them. My teaching will, in general, begin, where theirs is deliberately arrested, not as exhausted, but as designedly proceeding no further.