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Where Men Are Still Cheaper Than Machinery.

GREATEST good to the greatest number makes some strange cus- toms in India. The inhabitants are num- bered by milHons, and they are so pinched for money that a httle has to go a long way. The companies operat-

���Machinery would be used to sift ashes

and pump slime in modern communities,

but in India hand work is cheaper

ing gold mines there find it the best poHcy to hire all the labor they can, both because it is cheaper than in- stalling labor saving machinery and because by that means they can save many from starvation.

Wages are extremely low and work- men are often very intelligent, performing exceptionally good work. Raw ma- terial is cheap, too, and the combination

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effectually bars out modern progress. For instance, the trains of ore cars are hauled by bullocks. An aerial tramway was installed by an enterprising man- ager, but he soon found that his mainte- nance charges were much greater than the total freight costs when the bullocks were used. Back came the bullocks and their native drivers.

Instead of using machin- ery, women and girls are employed to sift the ashes and recover small particles of unburned coal. The sys- tem is cheap and effective. So is the handling of slime pulp from the mills. This is a fine, slimy mud which is settled in big stone tanks in order to recover the wa- ter from it.

In progressive countries heavy pumps are used to

empty the settled mud from

the tanks, but in India they use native laborers and a primitive mechanism which takes much more time, uses more labor, and is not nearly so satisfactory, but it is cheaper and keeps many natives in food. A woman scoops the mud into a basket, two men raise it on the end of a long lever sweep, another empties it into a trough while a woman pushes it with a long stick to give it impetus enough to move along to its destination. The spectacle would drive a modern efficiency expert to distraction, but he would reconcile himself to it when he figured out the relative cost of machin- ery and men.

Ingenious Slide Rule for Motorists

A SLIDE rule has been devised by which a motorist can compute accu- rately the ratios which exist between the number of revolutions of the engine and the mileage of the car per mile; the cor- responding ratio of gear reduction, etc. It can also be used to ascertain the theo- retical horsepower by the knowledge of the cylinder dimensions, and the reci- procal relations between various parts of the machinery. It is intended that the device will bear the name of some automobile manufacturer and be used as an advertising novelty.

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