_Modern Jewelry._--So far we have gone over the progress and results of the jeweller's art. We have now to speak of the production of jewelry as a modern art industry, in which large numbers of men and women are employed in the larger cities of Europe. Paris, Vienna, London and Birmingham are the most important centres. An illustration of the manufacture as carried on in London and Birmingham will be sufficient to give an insight into the technique and artistic manipulation of this branch of art industry; but, by way of contrast, it may be interesting to give in the first place a description of the native working jeweller of Hindustan. He travels very much after the fashion of a tinker in England; his budget contains tools, materials, fire pots, and all the requisites of his handicraft. The gold to be used is generally supplied by the patron or employer, and is frequently in gold coin, which the travelling jeweller undertakes to convert into the ornaments required. He squats down in the corner of a courtyard, or under cover of a veranda, lights his fire, cuts up the gold pieces entrusted to him, hammers, cuts, shapes, drills, solders with the blow-pipe, files, scrapes and burnishes until he has produced the desired effect. If he has stones to set or coloured enamels to introduce, he never seems to make a mistake; his instinct for harmony of colour, like that of his brother craftsman the weaver, is as unerring as that of the bird in the construction of its nest. Whether the materials are common or rich and rare, he invariably does the very best possible with them, according to native ideas of beauty in design and combination. It is only when he is interfered with by European dictation that he ever vulgarizes his art or makes a mistake. The result may appear rude in its finish, but the design and the thought are invariably right. We thus see how a trade in the working of which the "plant" is so simple and wants are so readily met could spread itself, as in years past it did at Clerkenwell and at Birmingham before gigantic factories were invented for producing everything under the sun. It is impossible to find any date at which the systematic production of jewelry was introduced into England. Probably the Clerkenwell trade dates its origin from the revocation of the edict of Nantes, as the skilled artisans in the jewelry, clock and watch, and trinket trades appear to have been descendants of the emigrant Huguenots. The Birmingham trade would appear to have had its origin in the skill to which the workers in fine steel had attained towards the middle and end of the 18th century, a branch of industry which collapsed after the French Revolution.