of Commerce_ of 1,150 pages, is the
following account of the manufacture of the celebrated
Laurencekirk snuff-boxes. It is right, however, to explain,
that Mr. Macculloch only mentions these boxes here for the
purpose of giving the following details, not to be met with in
any other publication.]

These beautiful boxes were first manufactured at the village of
Laurencekirk, in Kincardineshire, about forty years since. The
original inventer was a cripple hardly possessed of the power of
locomotion. In place of curtains, his bed (rather a curious workshop)
was surrounded with benches and receptacles for tools, in the
contrivance and use of which he discovered the utmost ingenuity. The
inventer, instead of taking out a patent, confided his secret to a
joiner in the same village, who in a few years amassed a considerable
property; while the other died, as he had lived, in the greatest
poverty. The great difficulty of the manufacture lies in the formation
of the hinge, which in a genuine box is so delicately made as hardly
to be visible. Peculiar, or, as they are called, secret tools are
required in its formation; and though they must have been improved
by time and experience, the mystery attached to their preparation is
still so studiously kept up, that the workmen employed in one shop are
rigorously debarred from having any communication with those employed
in another.

About the beginning of this century, an ingenious individual belonging
to the village of Cumnock, in Ayrshire, of the name of Crawford,
having seen one of the Laurencekirk snuff-boxes, succeeded, after
various attempts, by the assistance of a watchmaker of the same
village, who made the tools, in producing a similar box; and by his
success, not only laid the foundation of his own fortune, but greatly
enriched his native parish and province. For awhile, the Laurencekirk
boxes were most in demand; but Mr. Crawford and his neighbours in
Cumnock not only copied the art, but so improved and perfected it,
that in a very few years, for every box made in the north there were,
probably, twenty made in the south. In 1826, the Cumnock trade was
divided amongst eight master manufacturers, who employed considerably
more than 100 persons. The demand at that time equalled the supply,
and it was calculated that the trade yielded from 7,000_l._ to
8,000_l._ annually,--a large product for a manufacture seemingly
so insignificant, and consisting almost