What particularly surprises the visitor to the Gorham works at Providence is to see labor-saving machinery--the ponderous steam-hammer, the stamping and rolling apparatus--employed in silver work, instead of the baser metals to which they are usually applied. Nothing is done by hand which can be done by machinery; so that the three hundred men usually employed in solid ware are in reality doing the work of a thousand. The first operation is to buy silver coin in Wall Street. In a bag of dollars there are always some bad pieces; and as the company embark their reputation in every silver vessel that leaves the factory, and are always responsible for its purity, each dollar is wrenched asunder and its goodness positively ascertained before it is thrown into the crucible. The subsequent operations, by which these spoiled dollars are converted into objects of brilliant and enduring beauty, can better be imagined than described. New forms of beauty are the constant study of the artist in silver. One large apartment in the Gorham establishment--the artists' room--is a kind of magazine or storehouse of beautiful forms, which have been gathered in the course of years by Mr. George Wilkinson, the member of the company who has charge of the designing, and who is himself a designer of singular taste, fertility, and judgment. Here are deposited copies or drawings of all the former products of the establishment. Here is a large and most costly library of illustrated works in every department of art and science. Mr. Wilkinson gets ideas from works upon botany, sculpture, landscape,--from ancient bas-reliefs and modern porcelain; but, more frequently, from those large volumes which exhibit the glories of architecture. "The first requisite," he maintains, "of a good piece of silver-plate is that it be _well built_." The artist in silver has also to keep constantly in view the practical and commercial limitations of his art. The forms which he designs must be such as can be executed with due economy of labor and material, such as can be easily cleaned, and such as will please the taste of the silver-purchasing public. It is by his skill in complying with these inexorable conditions, while producing forms of real excellence, that Mr. Wilkinson has given such celebrity to the articles made by the company to which he belongs.