One of the greatest benefits to be expected from the improvement civilization is, that increased facilities of communication will render it possible to transport to places of consumption much valuable material that is now wasted because the price at the nearest market will not pay freight. The cattle slaughtered in South America for their hides would feed millions of the starving population of the Old World, if their flesh could be economically preserved and transported across the ocean. This, indeed, is already done, but on a scale which, though absolutely considerable, is relatively insignificant. South America sends to Europe a certain quantity of nutriment in the form of meat extracts, Liebig's and others; and preserved flesh from Australia is beginning to figure in the English market. We are beginning to learn a better economy in dealing with the inorganic world. The utilization--or, as the Germans more happily call it, the Verwerthung, the BEWORTHING--of waste from metallurgical, chemical, and manufacturing establishments, is among the most important results of the application of science to industrial purposes. The incidental products from the laboratories of manufacturing chemists often become more valuable than those for the preparation of which they were erected. The slags front silver refineries, and even from smelting houses of the coarser metals, have not unfrequently yielded to a second operator a better return than the first had derived from dealing with the natural ore; and the saving of lead carried off in the smoke of furnaces has, of itself, given a large profit on the capital invested in the works. According to Ure's Dictionary of Arts, see vol. ii., p. 832, an English miner has constructed flues five miles in length for the condensation of the smoke from his lead-works, and makes thereby an annual saving of metal to the value of ten thousand pounds sterling. A few years ago, an officer of an American mint was charged with embezzling gold committed to him for coinage. He insisted, in his defence, that much of the metal was volatilized and lost in refining and melting, and upon scraping the chimneys of the melting furnaces and the roofs of the adjacent houses, gold enough was found in the soot to account for no small part of the deficiency. The substitution of expensive machinery for manual labor, even in agriculture--not to speak of older and more familiar applications--besides being highly remunerative, has better secured the harvests, and it is computed that the 230,000 threshing machines used in the United States in 1870 obtained five per cent. more grain from the sheaves which passed through them than could have been secured by the use of the flail.