The first and, perhaps, the most important matter of all in founding engineering works is that of arrangement. As a commercial consideration affecting the cost of manipulation, and the expense of handling material, the arrangement of an establishment may determine, in a large degree, the profits that may be earned, and, as explained in a previous place, upon this matter of profits depends the success of such works.

Aside from the cost or difficulty of obtaining ground sufficient to carry out plans for engineering establishments, the diversity of their arrangement met with, even in those of modern construction, is no doubt owing to a want of reasoning from general premises. There is always a strong tendency to accommodate local conditions, and not unfrequently the details of shop manipulation are quite overlooked, or are not understood by those who arrange buildings.

The similarity of the operations carried on in all works directed to the manufacture of machinery, and the kind of knowledge that is required in planning and conducting such works, would lead us to suppose that at least as much system would exist in machine shops as in other manufacturing establishments, which is certainly not the case. There is, however, this difference to be considered: that whereas many kinds of establishments can be arranged at the beginning for a specific amount of business, machine shops generally grow up around a nucleus, and are gradually extended as their reputation and the demands for their productions increase; besides, the variety of operations required in an engineering establishment, and change from one class of work to another, are apt to lead to a confusion in arrangement, which is too often promoted, or at least not prevented, by insufficient estimates of the cost of handling and moving material.

Materials consumed in an engineering establishment consist mainly of iron, fuel, sand, and lumber. These articles, or their products, during the processes of manipulation, are continually approaching the erecting shop, from which finished machinery [72] is sent out after its completion. This constitutes the erecting shop, as a kind of focal centre of a works, which should be the base of a general plan of arrangement. This established, and the foundry, smithy, finishing, and pattern shops regarded as feeding departments to the erecting shop, it follows that the connections between the erecting shop and other departments should be as short as possible, and such as to allow free passage for material and ready communication between managers and workmen in the different rooms. These conditions would suggest a central room for erecting, with the various departments for casting, forging, and finishing, radiating from the erecting shop like the spokes of a wheel, or, what is nearly the same, branching off at right angles on either side and at one end of a hollow square, leaving the fourth side of the erecting room to front on a street or road, permitting free exit for machinery when completed.

The material when in its crude state not only consists of various things, such as iron, sand, coal, and lumber, that must be kept separate, but the bulk of such materials is much greater than their finished product. It is therefore quite natural to receive such material on the outside or "periphery" of the works where there is the most room for entrances and for the separate storing of such supplies. Such an arrangement is of course only possible where there can be access to a considerable part of the boundary of a works, yet there are but few cases where a shop cannot be arranged in general upon the plan suggested. By receiving material on the outside, and delivering the finished product from the centre, communications between the departments of an establishment are the shortest that it is possible to have; by observing the plans of the best establishments of modern arrangement, especially those in Europe, it may be seen that this system is ............