Among the leading productions of this century the establishment and growth of manufactures must be reckoned. Even before the Revolution, iron-mills at Salisbury, Connecticut, at Cold Spring, on the Hudson, at Valley Forge and Durham, Pennsylvania, had lifted their ponderous hammers to weld the fused ores, dragged out of our slightly tumbled beds by cars, and had commenced to fabricate instruments of husbandry, kitchen utensils, and other tripods on which sat, then as now, the Pythonesses of life, who not only interpret, but are themselves the oracles of fate. Our running streams soon coaxed cotton to take a turn around the spindles which Arkwright, in 1768, had so taught to whirl with their mechanical iron fingers, that one man could work a stubborn iron mule up to a capacity equal to one hundred and thirty of the human species. The cotton-gin, ere the century closed accounts with its busy customers, had handed over such clean cotton to the coquettish jennies, that very pretty yarns began to be spun along many gliding streams. The habits prevailing through the eighteenth century were still transitional. It was the chrysalis film, covering the flitting worm which had succeeded the inert and slow-moving grub of the seventeenth, and which was soon to burst into the gayer, full-winged butterfly of the nineteenth cycle of time. What habits they had were of solid silver. The platings, spread over and hiding darker substances with polished surfaces, were not yet invented. Morals, too, triturated by the ever-restless surges of time, like the pebbles on a shore which the industrious ocean ever scrubs and washes, became rounder and smoother, and lost something of those angular asperities which added nothing to their usefulness or strength. If we take an account of the purely intellectual and literary stock on hand in America at the close of the century, we shall find that, while the one hundred years had been run on a slender and mainly upon borrowed capital, there were results in fabricated stuffs by no means discreditable, and in raw material a mass very pleasant to contemplate. To a large extent our literary manufactures were still imitations of English styles, with an increasing tendency to introduce American figures in the patterns. The first literary effort was in hymn and psalm books. The very first volume printed in this country was “The Bay Psalm-Book,” published, of course, near Boston (at Cambridge) in 1640; rather slow in metres, but which, before 1750, had run through seventy editions,—run in fact so well and fast that, like certain plays now, it forgot how or where to stop. Singing-books, as an intellectual circulation, thus went to the American head, and, without blowing the matter too much, we may reasonably assume that this tendency set up the American nose as an instrument of psalmody.