owing to three different circumstances ; first, to the increase of dexterity
in every particular workman ; secondly, to the saving of the time which is
commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another ; and, lastly,
to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge
labour, and enable one man to do the work of many.

First, the improvement of the dexterity of the workmen, necessarily
increases the quantity of the work he can perform; and the division of
labour, by reducing every man's business to some one simple operation, and
by making this operation the sole employment of his life, necessarily
increases very much the dexterity of the workman. A common smith, who,
though accustomed to handle the hammer, has never been used to make nails,
if, upon some particular occasion, he is obliged to attempt it, will scarce,
I am assured, be able to make above two or three hundred nails in a day, and
those, too, very bad ones. A smith who has been accustomed to make nails,
but whose sole or principal business has not been that of a nailer, can
seldom, with his utmost diligence, make more than eight hundred or a
thousand nails in a day. I have seen several boys, under twenty years of
age, who had never exercised any other trade but that of making nails, and
who, when they exerted themselves, could make, each of them, upwards of two
thousand three hundred nails in a day. The making of a nail, however, is by
no means one of the simplest operations. The same person blows the bellows,
stirs or mends the fire as there is occasion, heats the iron, and forges
every part of the nail: in forging the head, too, he is obliged to change
his tools. The different operations into which the making of a pin, or of a
metal button, is subdivided, are all of them much more simple, and the
dexterity of the person, of whose life it has been the sole business to
perform them, is usually much greater. The rapidity with which some of the
operations of those manufactures are performed, exceeds what the human hand
could, by those who had never seen them, he supposed capable of acquiring.