Bursting of Dykes. The forces of Nature overcoming the industry of Man 99 Making ropes by machinery 119 Steam-boiler making 145 Shear and tilt-hammers--Steel Manufacture 151 Ancient lead-mine in Derbyshire 154 Coal-railway 157 Locomotive-engine factory 170 Stone quarry, Portland 177 Timber rafts of the Tyrol 178 Glass-cutting 191 Plate-glass factory 192 The English potter 194 Mill-room of a pottery 196 Cotton mule-spinning 222 Power-looms 229 Jacquard power-looms 241 Interior of Marshall's flax-mill, Leeds 250 Calico-printing by cylinder 252 Bleaching-ground at Glasgow 254 Electro-gilding 311 Pianoforte manufactory 320 Bas-relief on Gutenberg's monument 323 Paper-making by hand 341 Processes of bookbinding 342 KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. INTRODUCTION. It has been wisely said by a French writer who has scattered abroad sound and foolish opinions with a pretty equal hand, that "it requires a great deal of philosophy to observe once what is seen every day."[1] To no branch of human knowledge can this remark be more fitly applied than to that which relates to the commonest things of the world,--namely, the Wants of Man and the Means of satisfying them. Man, it has been maintained, has greater natural wants and fewer natural means than any other animal. That his wants are greater, even in the rudest state of the species, than the wants of any quadruped--to say nothing of animals lower in the scale of being--there can be no doubt. But that his natural means are feebler and fewer we cannot believe; for the exercise of his understanding, in a variety of ways which no brute intelligence can reach, is the greatest of his natural means,--and that power enables him to subdue all things to his use.