CHAPTER X. HOISTING, CONVEYING AND STORING. Allusion has been made to the stupendous buildings and works of the ancients and of the middle ages; the immense multitude of workers and great extent of time and labour employed in their construction; and how the awful drudgery involved in such undertakings was relieved by the invention of modern engineering devices--the cranes, the derricks, and the steam giants to operate them, so that vast loads which required large numbers of men and beasts to move, and long periods of time in which to move them, can now be lifted with ease and carried to great heights and distances in a few minutes by the hands of one or of a few men. But outside of the line of such undertakings there is an immense field of labor-saving appliances adapted for use in transportation of smaller loads from place to place, within and without buildings, and for carrying people and freight from the lower to the upper stories of tall structures. In fact the tall buildings which we see now in almost every great city towering cloudward from the ground to the height of fifteen, twenty and twenty-five stories, would have been extravagant and useless had not the invention of the modern elevator rendered their highest parts as easy of access as their lowest, and at the same time given to the air space above the city lot as great a commercial value in feet and inches as the stretch of earth itself. Many of the “sky-scrapers” so called, are splendid monuments of the latest inventions of the century. It is by means of the modern elevator that the business of a whole town may be transacted under a single roof. In the multiplicity of modern human contrivances by which the sweat and drudgery of life are saved, and time economised for worthier objects, we are apt to overlook the painful and laborious steps by which they were reached, and to regard with impatience, or at least with indifference, the story of their evolution; and yet no correct or profound knowledge of the growth of humanity to its higher planes can be obtained without noting to what extent the minor inventions, as well as the startling ones, have aided the upward progress.