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              Bulletin HASKINS & SELLS 23
The following members of our organiza­tion
are to be congratulated on their recent
attainment of the C. P. A. certificate of
the several states specified:
Mr. P. S. Gibson, New York Office,
Pennsylvania; Mr. H . R. Gore, New York
Office, New York; Mr. J . L . Martin, New
York Office, New Jersey; Mr. Elijah Bates,
Cleveland Office, Indiana.
Book Review
Keir, Malcolm. Manufacturing Industries
In America. (New York, The Ronald
Press Company, 1920. 324 p.)
The accountant who glances over the
pages of a new book may be pardoned if
he wonders, perhaps selfishly, what value
the volume may have for him from a
technical point of view. Such, at any rate,
was the attitude of mind in which the re­viewer
opened the treatise under con­sideration.
Having read the book from cover to
cover, which is something a reviewer sel­dom
does, the accountant whose pleasant
duty it is to review Keir's "Manufacturing
Industries in America" is put to some em­barrassment
to describe his enthusiasm
for it.
The book is exceedingly entertaining.
Few writers on dry technical subjects
have been able to arouse more than tech­nical
interest. There is little of romance
about iron and steel and cotton and wool.
But Keir has written a historical novel
with the industries as characters. He
appeals to the interest of the reader by
the simplicity of his style. He holds it
with the cleverness of his composition.
The book is instructive as well as enter­taining.
It brings out many bits of infor­mation
which the average reader would
rarely run across. For example, "Eastern
Massachusetts has no high-grade iron
although it was endowed with a poor
variety known as bog ore, yielding from
25 to 50 per cent. of iron. As its name
indicates, this ore was found in swamps
or at the bottom of ponds, precipitated
from the water by minute animals. . . .
It lay from one-half to two feet deep, so
a man in a boat working diligently with
grappling irons or tongs could gather two
tons in a day. . . . Thus one constricted
area with a number of large ore-bearing
ponds could keep a small-scale furnace in
continuous operation. For example, a
pond at Middleboro, Massachusetts,
yielded 300 to 600 tons of ore a year for
over 60 years."
Read what the author says about the
Bessemer process of making steel. "The