It is very defective economy to fit the parts of machines together by trial instead of making them by aid of correct drawings and standard tools for accurate measurement. It is faulty economy to practice borrowing and lending working tools. The idea that economy consists in withholding every expense not absolutely demanded is erroneous. An extra outlay in one or another direction often assures the saving as well as the making of money. Wise economy looks to the future as well as the present, and requires that all work sent out from a shop should be of the best and most reliable character.--_American Machinist._ * * * * * THE REWARD OF INVENTION. _Capital and Labor_ publishes the substance of a letter from Mr. Henry Bessemer with reference to the refusal of the English Government, or of its ambassador in Paris, to allow the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor to be accepted by its countrymen, and in his letter Mr. Bessemer furnishes some autobiographic particulars which cannot fail to be of interest. He tells us that at the age of eighteen he came to London from a small country village, knowing no one, and himself unknown; but his studious habits and his love of invention soon gained for him a footing, and in two years he was pursuing a method of his own invention for taking copies from antique and modern bassi-rilievi in a manner that enabled him to stamp them on a cardboard, thus producing thousands of embossed copies of the highest works of art, at a small cost. The facility for making a permanent die, even from a thin paper original, capable of producing a thousand copies, would have opened a wide door to successful fraud if the process had been known to unscrupulous persons; for by its means, Mr. Bessemer states, there is not a government stamp, or the paper seal of a corporate body, that every common office clerk could not forge in a few minutes at the office of his employer or at his own home. The production of a die from a common paper stamp is the work of only ten minutes; the materials cost less than one penny. No sort of technical skill is necessary, and a common copying press or letter stamp yields most successful copies. There is no need for the would-be forger to associate himself with a skillful die sinker, capable of making a good imitation in steel of the original, for the merest tyro could make an absolute copy on the first attempt. The public knowledge of such a means of forging would, at that time, have shattered the whole system of the British Stamp Office, had a knowledge of the method been allowed to escape. The secret has, however, been carefully guarded to this day.