and cunning fingers put them together, every wheel knows its
place, and every pivot and every screw its home, though it be
picked without discrimination from a dish containing ten thousand.
Yet among these parts there are screws of which it takes one
hundred and fifty thousand to make a pound, and shafts and
bearings which are so delicately turned that five thousand
shavings will only extend a lineal inch along the steel. This is
the way American watches are made, and this is the way in which
the highest practicable perfection is reached in the manufacture
of these pocket monitors.

Here we have small work, organized, and great elaboration of
related details. When Dr. Scott wrote his passages on the card,
his work was very simple. He did only one thing--he made letters.
When he had made letter after letter until the little space was
filled, his work was done. It was not a part of some complicated
and inter-dependent whole, related to a thousand other parts in
other hands. I suppose it may be as delicate work to drill a jewel
with a hair of steel, armed with paste of diamond-dust, as to
write "Our Father" under a microscope; but when the jewel has to
be drilled with relation to the reception of a revolving metallic
pivot, the process becomes very much nicer. So here are a hundred
processes going on at the same time, in different parts of a
building, all related to each other, each delicate almost beyond
description, and effected with such precision that a mistake is so
much an exception that it is a surprise. I have seen the huge
steam engines at Scranton which furnish power for the blast of the
furnaces there, and their magnitude and power and most impressive
majesty of movement have made me tremble; yet as works of man they
are no greater than a Waltham watch.