Hen. But there is a great deal of trouble with corn: you have often made me take notice how much pains it costs the farmer to plough his ground, and put the seed in the earth, and keep it clear from weeds.
Fa. Very true: but the farmer does not make the corn; he only prepares for it a proper soil and situation, and removes every hinderance arising from the hardness of the ground, or the neighbourhood of other plants, which might obstruct the secret and wonderful process of vegetation; but with the vegetation itself he has nothing to do. It is not his hand that draws out the slender fibres of the root, pushes up the green stalk, and by degrees the spiky ear; swells the grain, and embrowns it with that rich tinge of tawny russet, which informs the husbandman it is time to put in his sickle: all this operation is performed without his care, or even knowledge.
Hen. Now, then, I understand; corn is a production, and bread is a manufacture.
Fa. Bread is certainly, in strictness of speech, a manufacture; but we do not in general apply the term to anything in which the original material is so little changed. If we wanted to speak of bread philosophically, we should say, it is a preparation of corn.
Hen. Is sugar a manufacture?
Fa. No, for the same reason. Besides which, I do not recollect the term being applied to any article of food; I suppose from an idea that food is of too perishable a nature, and generally obtained by a process too simple to deserve the name. We say, therefore, sugar-works, oil-mills, chocolate-works; we do not say a beer-manufactory, but a brewery; but this is only a nicety of language, for properly all those are manufactories, if there is much of art and curiosity in the process.
Hen. Do we say a manufactory of pictures?
Fa. No; but for a different reason. A picture, especially if it belong to any of the higher kinds of painting, is an effort of genius. A picture cannot be produced by any given combinations of canvass and colour. It is the hand, indeed, that executes, but the head that works. Sir Joshua Reynolds could not have gone, when he was engaged to paint a picture, and hired workmen, the one to draw the eyes, another the nose, a third the mouth: the whole must be the painter’s own, that particular painter’s, and no other; and no one who has not his ideas can do his work. His work is therefore nobler, of a higher species.
Hen. Pray, give me an instance of a manufacture.
Fa. The making of watches is a manufacture: the silver, iron, gold, or whatever else is used in it, are productions, the materials of the work; but it is by the wonderful art of man that they are wrought into the numberless wheels and springs of which this complicated machine is composed.