The list includes nearly 600 articles.  Among these are included the tools of carpenters, coopers, gardeners, butchers, glaziers, farriers, saddlers, tinmen, shoemakers, weavers, wheelwrights, as well as corkscrews, sugar-tongs, sugar-nippers, boot-hooks, button-hooks, door-scrapers, calipers, printing-irons, dog-collars, chains, whistles, tinderboxes, and tobacco-stoppers.

Hammers occupy a leading place, of which there are two or three hundred varieties, belonging to different trades, each of which is divided into eight or ten different weights.  Birmingham has the largest share of the heavy toy trade, although there are extensive manufacturers in Sheffield and Wolverhampton.  Fine edge tools are chiefly and best made at Sheffield.

This trade increases annually in importance, as it consists of articles which are greatly in demand in new countries; and new markets are opened by every new colonising enterprise of the Anglo-Saxon race.  The manufacture includes a great deal of wood-work for handles, as well as iron and steel.  For although many axes are made for the American market, after special patterns, and with national mottoes, no handles are ever sent, as the backwoodsmen have better wood for their purpose at command.  Our axe handles are stiff; a backwoodsman must have a flexible handle or haft.

The Germans once tried to compete with us in the home market, but the attempt was a failure.

As an instance of the odd accidents that affect the Birmingham trade, about three years ago, when flounces were in fashion, a great demand sprang up for pinking irons, previously only used for ornamenting the hems of shrouds.  A workman informed the correspondent of the Morning Chronicle that he had earned about 3 pounds a week for two years at making them.

The scientific tools of housebreakers are known to be made by certain journeymen in the steel toy trade.  On the other hand, hand-cuffs, leg-irons, and similar restraining instruments are manufactured for home use and exportation.

Occasionally, London and Liverpool houses in the Brazilian or Cuban trade have ordered suits of chains, intended for the use of slave-ships.  These are cheap, coarse, painted black, and horrid looking.  Among the orders on the books of a manufacturer, were several dozen pair of hand-cuffs for ladies.

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The edge tool manufacture, which is increasing in Birmingham, probably in consequence of the repeated strikes at Sheffield, added to the superior position of Birmingham as regards coal, and the markets of London, Liverpool, and Bristol, is often carried on in conjunction with that of steel toys.  There are forty-five different kinds of axes; fourteen for the American market, twelve adzes, twenty-six bills and bill-hooks, and upwards of seventy hoes for different foreign countries—­Spain, Portugal, South America, the United States, and Australia, which will soon consume as much hardware as America did fifty years ago.