All over the kingdom manufacturing industries have a natural tendency to settle down in particular localities favoured by the proximity of the raw material, and by railway or water facilities. Thus Dundee, Aberdeen, and the North of Ireland are associated with linen and strong textiles; the Eastern counties and Lincolnshire with agriculture; Warwickshire and Yorkshire with machinery; Burton-on-Trent with beer; Coventry and Nottingham with cycles; and so on. Any intelligent schoolboy could reel off a list of such towns and their products. Swansea, with its great works for smelting copper and tin ore--the former brought from South Australia, Chili, and Cornwall; the latter from the Straits Settlements and Cornwall--and its manufactories of tin plates, bolts, and zinc goods, is the centre for neighbouring towns associated with its industries, such as Porth, Pontypridd, and Penarth, which, together with the Mumbles, are partially linked together by tramways. Glasgow, where shipbuilding, armour-plate rolling, and locomotive constructing flourish, has around it the towns of Gourock, Greenock, Rothesay, Coatbridge, and Bridge of Allan, all more or less commercially interested in the great northern city. Newcastle-on-Tyne and Sunderland, headquarters of England’s shipbuilding, are surrounded by places connected with or engaged in kindred industries, as Tynemouth, Stockton, the Hartlepools, Gateshead, Jarrow, and North and South Shields--the last four practically suburbs of Newcastle--a fine field for electric tramways. Then in Yorkshire we have such centres of the linen and woollen interests as Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield, Halifax, etc., begirt with townlets which are in process of being interconnected; and further south, in South Lancashire, Burnley, Oldham, Ashton, Blackburn, Preston, Rochdale, Bolton, Manchester, and Liverpool, together with endless smaller places--every one of them engaged in our gigantic cotton trade--cover large thickly populated areas, supplied with tramway means of intercommunication. THE BLACK COUNTRY AND THE POTTERIES A remarkable instance of the localisation of special industries, and of a city begirt with good-sized towns, is to be found in the South Staffordshire Black Country, its central sun being the city of Birmingham. While in the Potteries are a number of small towns almost touching one another--star clusters, destined maybe eventually to coalesce into a single planet of the first magnitude. Here humanity swarms.