Page:Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks (1853).djvu/22

 and door-fastenings have not, until modern times, been susceptible of any classified arrangement according to their principles of construction. They have been too simple to require it, and too little varied to permit it. That some such fastenings must be employed wherever doors of any kind are used is sufficiently apparent; and there is a little (though only a little) information obtainable, which shews the nature of the fastenings adopted in early times. The bolt, the hasp, the chain, the bar, the latch, the lock, all were known, in one or other of their various forms, in those ages which we are accustomed to consider classical. Travellers, generally speaking, do not descend to locks, or rather they do not think about them; otherwise they might have collected much that would have been novel and applicable to the present work; and, indeed, there is some ground for the assertion, that a notice of the door-fastenings of all nations would reveal to us something of the social and domestic habits of various members of the great human family. Be this as it may, however, we may profitably make a little inquiry into the locks of ancient times.

In the volumes of Lardner’s Cyclopædia relating to the “Manners and Customs of the ancient Greeks and Romans,” we do not find any mention of the kinds of locks used by those nations; but the author, while describing the houses, says:—“Doors turned anciently upon large pivots in the centre, let into sockets in the lintel and threshold, so that one of the sides opened inwards, the other outwards; and Plutarch gives the following curious reason why persons were to knock and