It is not necessary for us to describe the machinery used in pin-making, to make the reader comprehend its effects. A pin is made of brass. We have seen how metal is obtained from ore by machinery; and therefore we will not go over that ground. But suppose the most skilful workman has a lump of brass ready by his side, to make it into pins with common tools,--with a hammer and with a file. He heats it upon an anvil, till it becomes nearly thin enough for his purpose. A very fine hammer, and a very fine touch, must he have to produce a pin of any sort,--even a large corking-pin! But the pin made by machinery is a perfect cylinder. To make a metal, or even a wooden cylinder, of a considerable size, with files and polishing, is an operation so difficult that it is never attempted; but with a lathe and a sliding rest it is done every hour by a great many workmen. How much more difficult would it be to make a perfect cylinder the size of a pin? A pin hammered out by hand would present a number of rough edges that would tear the clothes, as well as hold them together. It would not be much more useful or ornamental than the skewer of bone with which the woman of the Sandwich Islands fastens her mats. But the wire of which pins are made acquires a perfectly cylindrical form by the simplest machinery. It is forcibly drawn through the circular holes of a steel plate; and the hole being smaller and smaller each time it is drawn through, it is at length reduced to the size required. The head of a pin is a more difficult thing to make even than the body. It is formed of a small piece of wire twisted round so as to fit upon the other wire. It is said that by a machine fifty thousand heads can be made in an hour. We should think that a man would be very skilful to make fifty in an hour by hand, in the roughest manner; if so, the machine does the work of a thousand men. The machine, however, does not do all the work. The head is attached to the body of a pin by the fingers of a child, while another machine rivets it on. The operations of cutting and pointing the pins are also done by machinery; and they are polished by a chemical process. It is by these processes,--by these combinations of human labour with mechanical power,--that it occurs that fifty pins can be bought for one halfpenny, and that therefore four or five thousand pins may be consumed in a year by the most economical housewife, at a much less price than fifty pins of a rude make cost two or three centuries ago. A woman's allowance was formerly called her _pin-money_,--a proof that the pins were a sufficiently dear article to make a large item in her expenses. If pins now were to cost a halfpenny apiece instead of being fifty for a halfpenny, the greater number of females would adopt other modes of fastening their dress, which would probably be less neat and convenient than pins. No such circumstance could happen while the machinery of pin-making was in use.