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following notes, relating to a subject of considerable interest both to the architect and the antiquary, have been extracted from the MS. collections of the late Mr. Rickman, which have come into the possession of Mr. Parker. They appear to have been composed as a communication to a provincial Architectural Society, chiefly with the view of engaging the attention of its members to the subject, and of eliciting more extended information "on the probable antiquity of the present implements of design." Some years have elapsed since this useful suggestion was made by Mr. Rickman, and, although various valuable facts connected with such researches have been subsequently made known, it does not appear that any archæological writer, in England, has hitherto bestowed upon the subject the attention which it appears to deserve. The remarks, however, of Mr. Rickman may be regarded with interest by many of our readers, and they are here offered for their perusal, not as affording fully detailed information, but in order to recall the attention of archæologists to a matter of interesting enquiry.

Surrounded as we are in the present day with mechanical inventions of the greatest delicacy, we are not often led to consider how those operations, now so greatly facilitated by various mechanical arrangements, were performed, at a time when these were deficient, and those materials which are now most common, were wholly unknown.

In the course of investigations necessary for the compilation of the third part of a paper containing the examination of Sir James Hall's Essay on Gothic Architecture, I had been forcibly struck as often heretofore with the total absence (so far as I had been able to find) of architectural designs made during that period in which the richest and most valuable examples of English architecture were erected, viz., the fourteenth century. Of this date we possess a variety of documents, manuscripts, fabric rolls, &c., which belonged to our monastic and other institutions, having been preserved amidst