Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/249

Rh pressure, causing a slight swelling in the center, gave rise to the entasis of the column."

With the Greeks and the Romans, carpentry, as well as its sister arts, made great progress, by being applied to war purposes. Military carpenters became the bulwarks of warfare; they were the strategists and pioneers of the time. Be the siege of Troy either history or fable, Homer's accounts prove beyond doubt that the Greeks possessed war-engines contrived with unusual ingenuity: the wooden horse that caused the fall of Troy, and the Argonauts' ship, taking them even as symbols, bear witness to this fact. To any one who, in his boyhood, has perused Cæsar's "Commentaries," the description of the famous bridge thrown by his legions over the Rhine must be still so familiar as to render it useless for us to dwell any longer on this detail. It is evident, however, that in Greece and Rome carpentry, as applied to building, yielded early to masonry. Wood was too soft a material for those sturdy citizens to struggle against; their pride and wealth were too great, their taste too refined, not to prefer the durable and majestic appearance of stone and marble to the perishable littleness of a vegetable matter. Yet, as an art subservient to masonry, carpentry was always up to the standard of the former. But the existence of a perfect system of levers and pulleys, in a word, of all kinds of machinery, may explain the locomotion of those monoliths which are seen standing to this day, like giants among pygmies, at enormous distances from their place of origin. The English are perplexed as to the best means of transporting Cleopatra's Needle to England: Roman carpenters would have deemed it an every-day job!

Had Cæsar taken the same trouble in describing the dwellings of the Gauls as he has respecting their fortifications, war-engines, and ships, an exact idea of their domestic carpentry, at that distant period, would be easily formed. But this not being the case, we can give but very scanty information on the subject. At any rate, the twenty cities of the Biturians, burned down by order of Vercingetorix—the last of the Gauls—were built of wood. In the remote parts of the country which had scarcely any dealings with the invaders, so much is still left of Gallic traditions that, according to Paul Lacroix, it is more than a simple presumption to state that they resembled in shape the rectangular, straw-roofed huts of the modern peasants of northern France, and of the mountaineers of Auvergne. On the other hand, in the merchant cities of the Mediterranean, carpentry was developed in a manner corresponding to their wealth and extravagance. In the interior, numbers of houses were a mixture of wood and stone work, with colonnades and porticoes, which we would liken somewhat to the cottages so common nowadays in this country. The Gauls, too, excelled in military carpentry. "When Cæsar threw his legions on their soil, every serious obstacle which he met was due to carpenters. They directed and executed all defense-works; their cities, like Alise, Bourges, and