Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery

From the beginning tool-makers have shown skill in fitting a tool to the hand, as in the Eskimo skin-scraper; this simple adaptation may have arrived in copying the effect of wear. Other good hints have come from observing an implement after its work is done. At the places where mud clung to a plowshare the plow-maker was long ago told at what points to raise his metal; conversely, when a cutter of any kind is unduly worn at any part of its side, there the metal asks to be somewhat narrowed down.

Annular Drills.

A circle of say two feet in diameter, may be readily cut from a boiler plate by two cutters, one at each end of a horizontal bar, the bar being supported by a central upright axis receiving the motive power. Because the cut is narrow, but little metal is wasted as chips. A cut of this ring-shape effects a desirable saving even when the circle to be swept is but an inch or so in width instead of several feet. When an auger takes its way through a plank it removes as chips all the wood within the circle of its range; a drill, of common form, as it pierces stone or metal acts in a similar manner. Motive power is greatly economized when a drill is tubular, with the further advantage that within the ring cut a solid cylinder remains to be broken off at intervals and lifted out, its core informing to the engineer in quest of bed-rock, to the prospector of mines or oil-fields, or to the geologist who reads at a glance the composition of a mineral, the forces which have impressed it age after age. Such drills, set with bortz diamonds, have accomplished remarkable feats. In boring out 260 columns surrounding the dome of the capitol at Springfield, Illinois, cores 22³⁄₄ inches in diameter were removed from holes 24 inches wide; without sacrifice of strength there was a saving in weight of three-fifths. At the Ellenwood coal mine, Kingston, Pennsylvania, a core 17 feet, 5 inches in breadth was taken from a bore only five inches wider. When the engineers in 1896 were planning the foundations for the Williamsburg Bridge, New York, the deepest of their 22 borings was 112 feet below high water. Steel drills had indicated bed-rock 12 to 20 feet higher than was the actual case; the diamond drill showed the supposed bed-rock to be merely a deposit of boulders. No other known means could have accomplished these results. In the same way steel guns of large calibre have been drilled so as to leave a core of much value, while in this as in all other such tasks, the boring demanded less energy and proved less straining than if all the metal within the sweep of the drill had been reduced to fragments. All these tools were prefigured in a simple ring drill used two thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile; hollow reeds were employed, with sand as a cutter.

Twist Drills.

Twist drills are superseding flat drills as stronger and better in every way. A twist drill is made with a slight taper toward the shank end. Its cross-section is not quite round, the diameter being reduced from a short distance behind the cutting edge, so as to diminish friction and give the sides of the drill as much clearance as possible. The advanced edges of the flutes are all full circle, so as to maintain the diameter of the drill and keep the tool steady. The advantage of the twist drill is that its cuttings find free egress, while it always runs true, without reforging or retempering. The cutting edges are usually ground to an angle of sixty degrees to the center line of the drill; for brass work the angle should be fifty degrees.

Lathe and Planer Tools.

The manner in which a lathe tool cuts metal is shown in an outline which represents a tool feeding a cut along a piece of wrought iron. The removed metal, in its diameter and openness, tells the expert operator both the quality of his cutter and how it is being affected by wear. The principal consideration, says Mr. Joshua Rose, in determining the proper shape of a cutting tool, for use in a lathe or a planer, is where it shall have the rake, or inclination, to make it keen enough to cut well, and yet be as strong as possible; this is governed, in a large degree, by the nature of the work.

Machine Tools: Lathes.

In giving form to wood and metal cheaply and rapidly, machine-tools have within recent years risen to great importance. Of these the lathe is one of the chief. It seems to be descended from the bow drill, the tool which was whirled by a cord wrapped round it, or it may be, that under another sky, the lathe was derived from the potter’s wheel whose axle was changed from a vertical to a horizontal plane. For centuries all lathes had their cutting tools simply laid on a bar, or rest, just as in the hand cutting lathe of to-day. While this afforded opportunity to skill it did not lend itself to large or uniform production. Henry Maudslay, about a century ago, immensely broadened the machine in scope by devising the slide rest which firmly grasps the cutting tool, and automatically moves it toward or away from the axis of the work, as well as along the work in any desired line. This device is equally applicable whether in turning a pencil case, the granite columns for a cathedral, or the propeller-shaft of an ocean steamer.

The lathe has been developed in many ways until it has become one of the most complex of all machines, adapted to tasks which even twenty years ago seemed impossible. Only two of its varieties can here be noticed, the Blanchard lathe for cutting irregular forms, and the turret lathe. An illustration, taken from an old engraving shows the Blanchard lathe as originally built for shoe-lasts. A pattern-last and the block to be carved are fixed on the same axis and are revolved by a pulley. On a sliding carriage are fastened pivots from which are freely suspended the axles of a cutting wheel, and a friction wheel, equal in diameter. The cutting wheel turns on a horizontal axle, and bears on its periphery a series of cutters. The friction wheel is in contact with the pattern-last and presses against it while in motion. During revolution, the pattern, irregular in its surface, causes the axis to approach or recede from this friction wheel; the cutting wheel in its corresponding motion removes wood from the block until a duplicate of the pattern appears. This lathe much improved and modified now turns not only gun-stocks, axe-handles and the like, but repeats elaborate carvings with precision. Ornaments for Pullman cars are produced by this machine.

The turret lathe, equally ingenious, has a turret or capstan, which carries let us say eight different tools, one on each of its eight faces. In its turn each tool operates on the work in its forward traverse; it then retires while the turret automatically moves through one-eighth of a circle, when the next tool emerges for its task, and so on.[7]

Lathes have given rise to planers, now built of great strength and in highly complicated designs. In a lathe the object turns upon centers against a tool; a planer carries its tool in a revolving cylinder, the work being fed in a straight line. A shaper, with much the same essential construction, moves along its work, the wood or metal operated on remaining stationary. With a planer or a shaper the size and uniformity of the work depend upon the skill of the operator. The planer has led to the invention of a machine which dispenses with this skill. Bramah, in 1811, employed a revolving cutter to plane iron, adapting to metal the familiar mechanism for planing wood. This was the beginning of the milling machine, now so remarkably developed and improved. A skilled mechanic sets the machine and the chucks which hold the work; an unskilled hand can continue the operations, his products being uniformly of the dimensions and forms desired. Intricate shapes are easily executed, quite impracticable on any other machine. At first the revolving mechanism and its cutters were a single piece of metal; to-day cutters of costly quality are inserted in cheap metal; these inserted cutters when worn out are easily replaced.

In many cases the milling machine ousts the planer as much more economical. At the shops of the Taylor Signal Company, Buffalo, a miller of the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company does nine-fold as much work as a planer. It takes a first cut ¹⁄₈ inch deep across a full width of 12 inches, makes 60 revolutions per minute, feeds .075 inch per turn, giving a table travel of 4¹⁄₂ inches per minute, with an accuracy limit of .001 inch.

Now for a glimpse of what a great inventor had to suffer because he lived prior to the era of machine tools, before the days, indeed, of that indispensable organ of the lathe, its slide rest. The first steam engines of James Watt built at the Soho Works, near Birmingham, are thus described:—“A cast iron cylinder, over 18 inches in diameter, an inch thick and weighing half a ton, not perfect, but without any gross error was procured, and the piston, to diminish friction and the consequent wear of metal, was girt with a brass hoop two inches broad. When first tried the engine goes marvelously bad; it made eight strokes per minute; but upon Joseph’s endeavoring to mend it, it stood still; and that, too, though the piston was helped with all the appliances of hat, papier maché, grease, blacklead powder, a bottle of oil to drain through the hat and lubricate the sides, and an iron weight above all to prevent the piston leaving the paper behind in its stroke—after some imperfections of the valves were remedied, the engine makes 500 strokes with about two hundred weight of coals.” In another month or two, with better condensation, it “makes 2,000 strokes with one hundred weight of coals.”

Emery and Carborundum Wheels.

Emery, carborundum and alundum wheels are developed from the grindstone of the distant past. That stone gives a straight-line finish or edge to the surfaces submitted to it; and as the work is shifted in front of the stone these surfaces may take a curved or other contour. But a grindstone, let it be as hard as can be found, is not hard enough to take and keep any other than a cylindrical form. Its successors of to-day, the carborundum wheel especially, can be of varied shapes, and transfer these to metal with celerity and economy.

Carborundum, a compound of silicon and carbon, is produced at Niagara Falls, New York, by a process devised by Mr. E. G. Acheson. In an electrical furnace are placed granulated coke, sand, a little salt, and some sawdust to keep the mixture porous and allow generated gases to escape freely. The crystals of carborundum thus produced require seven horse-power hours for each pound; in hardness they are excelled by the diamond only. United under severe hydraulic pressure by a vitrified bond they are eight times as efficient as emery in abrasion. Carborundum wheels are replacing lathes as a means of finishing axles, piston-rods and rolls; their accuracy is unsurpassed, while they demand but one third the time needed by a steel tool.

Form in Plastic Arts.

At the very dawn of art moist clay was molded into useful plates and bowls. This foreran not only all that the potter has since accomplished, but all that has been achieved in the foundry and the mint. In making bricks, tiles, and terra cotta, the first task is to make the clay plastic, then advantage is taken of its plasticity. In like manner we heat a metal to fluidity, and then pour it into a mold to make a fence rail, a stove plate, or a car wheel. An electric bath refines upon this process. Copper, let us say, dissolves in a tank, and concurrently its particles are deposited on a mold from which the metal can be readily stripped, avoiding the distortion inevitable when heat has come into play.

Within the past ten years concrete has grown into much importance as a building material, especially as reinforced with steel. It is a great deal easier and cheaper to pour a wall into molds than to lay courses of brick, or cut and dispose stone-work. Elsewhere in this book a few pages are given to reinforced concrete, and its applications.

Pressing and Stamping.

Pressing, like molding, has of late years much extended its range of forms. In germ it goes back to the distant day when seals were impressed upon clay tablets, and coins or medals were struck from hard matrices. In glass manufacture the press has been used for centuries. Cheap pressed tumblers and bowls have long been accompanied by cheap metal pots and pans, plates and basins, stamped by machinery. To-day much enlarged and improved, such machinery, as a Bliss press, makes a kitchen sink from a sheet of steel, forms gears and pinions from round bars of metal, and executes the intricate curves of a mandolin in a plate of aluminum. For a good while the spinning lathe gave us from thin metallic sheets a variety of cups, saucers, dishes, parts of kettles, lamps, and the like. To-day each of these articles is produced by a single blow of a die, proving that metals are plastic in a degree unsuspected in former days. Thus it comes about that the seams necessary to the tinman and the coppersmith, with all their liability to leaks and uncleanliness, have been largely dismissed and may soon be wholly banished. Pressing is illustrated on pages 184 to 186 of this book.

Old and New Means of Conferring Form.

To-day we are rich in old and new facilities for the bestowal of form. To confer shape by division we have an immense variety of knives, scissors, saws, axes, hatchets and shears. These, together with hammers, chisels and gouges enable us to disengage from a mass not merely a simple rail, panel, or table-top, but a carving or a statue. Surfaces are smoothed with a rasp, a file, a plane; sand is rubbed on abrasively, or falls from a height, or is forcibly blown with a blast of steam or air. Emery either spread on paper, or glued upon a wheel, grinds with an accuracy and speed new to art; and all that emery can do is outdone by carborundum and alundum, which slice away metal as if chalk, be its hardness what it may. Perforation is accomplished with rotary drills, or by a sandblast, or on occasion by corrosive acids—a final resource in treating refractory stone. Rolls of tremendous power reduce iron and steel in thickness, and, when suitably shaped, confer form on railroad rails, girders and the like. Every tool and implement, old or new, is now embodied in machines of gigantic force, or multiple effect, so that the skill of an earlier generation is either not in demand at all or passes to tasks of a delicacy never attempted before. It is by virtue of presses, enormous in power, that to-day shapes are bestowed on metals in successful rivalry with the ancient art of the founder himself. Indeed the art of conferring form by pouring a liquid into molds is at this hour largely exercised in work where heat plays no part whatever,—as in the tasks of the builder in concrete, the labors of the electrician as he employs a bath to separate a metal from its ore, or to plate a surface with silver or gold.

Use Creates Beauty.

In strong contrast with the varied resources of modern toil are the simple tools and implements of prehistoric skill which, modified much or little, are at this hour still indispensable to the mechanic, the builder, the engineer. These simple aids early became admirable in form so as to be all the more useful. Says Mr. George Bourne:—

“The beauty of tools is not accidental but inherent and essential. The contours of a ship’s sail bellying in the wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the curves of an adze-head or of a plowshare. Cast in iron or steel, the gracefulness of a plowshare is less destructible than the metal, yet pliant, within the limits of its type. It changes for different soils; it is widened out or narrowed; it is deep-grooved or shallow; not because of caprice at the foundry or to satisfy an artistic fad, but to meet the technical demands of the expert plowman. The most familiar example of beauty indicating subtle technique is supplied by the admired shape of boats, which is so variable, says an old coastguardsman, that the boat best adapted for one stretch of shore may be dangerous if not entirely useless at another stretch ten miles away. And as technique determines the design of a boat, or of a wagon, or of a plowshare, so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is responsible for any beauty or form they possess. Of all tools, none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist’s technique reached such marvelous fineness of power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example of a rule which is equally well exemplified by many humbler tools. Quarryman’s pick, coachman’s whip, cricket-bat, fishing-rod, trowel, all have their intimate relation to the skill of those who use them; and like animals and plants adapting themselves each to its own place in the universal order, they attain to beauty by force of being fit. That law of adaptation which shapes the wings of a swallow and prescribes the poise and elegance of the branches of trees, is the same that demands symmetry in the corn-rick and convexity in the barrel; and that, exerting itself with matchless precision through the trained senses of haymakers and woodmen, gives the final curve to the handles of their scythes and the shafts of their axes. Hence the beauty of a tool is an unfailing sign that in the proper handling of it technique is present.”[8]

In the course of a judicious review of the mechanical engineering of machine tools, Mr. Charles Griffin has this to say regarding convenience:—[9]

Convenience in the Use of Machines.

“A tool is an investment, the interest which it earns depending on the amount of work it turns out in a given time. This depends largely on its convenience of manipulation, involving a study of levers, handles, wheels, knobs and other auxiliary devices, their shape and place with reference to the best adaptation to the average human frame, the ease and extent of their motions, and the rapidity with which these motions may be accomplished. The position of the operator, his natural tendencies, the motions he will go through, all have to be imagined in view of the attainment of his maximum convenience. This study, in the absence of any counterpart of the proposed machine, often forces a resort to rough models, or in lieu of this, a full-size blackboard sketch, extending to the floor, upon which the location of parts may be tried for convenience.”

Resources Rich or Meagre as Affecting Invention.

In the National Museum, at Washington, the visitor as he inspects examples of American aboriginal art is astonished at its union of utility and beauty. Boat and paddle, spear and hook, basket and vase, are as admirable in form as useful in traveling, fishing, or carrying corn or water. How far an aboriginal designer may go largely turns upon what variety of resources Nature offers him. No few score families on a lonely islet of the Pacific can possibly rival the cloths and carvings displayed by tribes ranging a Pennsylvania, or a California, abounding with diverse minerals, plants and animals. When skill and invention occupy so rich a land they flower into the highest creations of aboriginal art. And yet it may be that the very fewness of a designer’s resources but spurs him to all the more ingenuity. It depends upon who the man is. As we look upon a collection of Eskimo harpoons and knives, coats and kayaks, we marvel that all these should be produced with so much excellence and variety from a scanty store of bones and teeth, sinews and hides, with but little iron or none at all.[10]

CHAPTER IX
FORM—Continued. FORM IN ABORIGINAL ART, AS AFFECTED BY MATERIALS. OLD FORMS PERSIST IN NEW MATERIALS

Nature’s gifts first used as given, then modified and copied . . . Rigid materials mean stiff patterns . . . New materials have not yet had their full effect on modern design.

Aboriginal Art.

So multiplied are the resources of modern industry that desired forms are created at will, almost without regard to the material employed. It is not so in primitive art, to which for a brief space we will now turn so that our survey of form, though all too cursory, may be refreshed by a contrast of old with new. Let us begin with a glance at some of the aids with which man first provided himself, taking the gifts of nature just as they were offered. In large areas of the Southern States, and of Central America, the gourd for ages has been a common plant, and has long served many Indian tribes as a water pitcher. On sea-shores, where the gourd did not grow, conch-shells were used instead, their users breaking away the outer spines and the inner whorls, leaving within a space clean and clear. Both gourds and shells gave their forms to the clay vessels which succeeded them.

In Zuni land, says Mr. F. H. Cushing, the first vessels for water were sections of cane or tubes of wood. We may infer that the wooden tubes were copied from the cane stems. What at first was passively accepted as nature gave it, was afterward changed a little, and then was step by step changed much, so that at length there grew up processes of manufacture. There was, for example, in California a wealth of osiers, reeds, and roots well suited for making baskets; these at last were perfected as water-tight receptacles neither brittle like a shell nor liable to a gourd’s swift decay. Beginning probably in mere wattling, in the rude plaiting of mats and roofs, the weaver came gradually upon finer and stronger materials than at first, with equal pace rising to new delicacy of finish and beauty of design. At the National Museum in Washington, the Hudson collection of Indian baskets from California includes the finest specimen in the world, a Pomo basket. Its sixty stitches to the running inch were possible only through using the carex root, easily divided into threads at once slender and strong.[11]

It is interesting to observe the limitation imposed upon a primitive designer by the qualities of the leaf, shell, or cane in his hands, the way in which these qualities point him to the forms in which he may excel. Of this we have capital examples in the basket-work of the North American aborigines as described by Mr. Otis T. Mason, in the report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1883-84. He says: “Along the coast of British Columbia the great cedar (Thuja gigantea) grows in the greatest abundance, and its bast furnishes a textile material of the greatest value. Here in the use of this pliable material the savages seem for the first time to have thought of checker-weaving. Mats, wallets, and rectangular baskets are produced by the plainest crossing of alternate strands varying in width from a millimeter to an inch. Ornamentation is effected both by introducing different-colored strands and by varying the width of the warp or the woof threads. . . . It is not astonishing that a material so easily worked should have found its way so extensively in the industries of this stock of Indians. Neither should we wonder that the checker pattern in weaving should first appear on the west coast among the only peoples possessing a material adapted to this form of ornamentation.”

Referring to the water-bottles of the Pai Utes, Mr. Mason says: “This style can be made coarse or fine, according to the material and size of the coil and outer threads. If two twigs of uniform thickness are carried around, the stitch will be hatchy and open; but if one of the twigs is larger than the other, or if yucca or other fibre replace one of them and narrower sewing material be used, the texture will be much finer.” Baskets and rain-hats, as woven by Haidas and many other tribes, are waterproof when wet, owing to the closeness of their texture.

Idiom of Material.

When reeds or somewhat rigid fibres are woven, they compel a straightness of edge in patterns and designs. A wave has to be suggested by stepped or broken lines, and so we have a rectilinear meander or fret, in contrast with its free-hand form as developed in a woven fabric. Under the constraint of her material a squaw as she weaves a design into a basket, must give squareness to a contour which would be somewhat rounded were it executed in delicate threads. This is clear in the human figures of the Pomo basket shown on page 109; and in those of a Yokut basket bowl, also in the National Museum in Washington, illustrated on the next page.

Stone and brick-work, in their rectilinear shapes, impose a rigidity in architectural design from which modern bricks, in their rich variety of flat and curved surfaces, have wrought emancipation. In the new residential streets of St. Louis, for example, the architecture owes much of its freedom and beauty to the new shapes in which brick is now manufactured. Even wider liberty than now falls to the lot of the brick-maker has always been enjoyed by the potter. In his hands clay lends itself to any desired imitation, to any fresh design however fanciful; what is more it invites those modifications of old forms in which art takes its chief forward strides. All but infinite are the variations which Japanese potters have played on the shapes of vases, jars, kettles, and basins, each clearly true to its type, while at the same time original in a pleasing way. How the Japanese artist in clay has rejoiced in his freedom is exemplified in the collection of Japanese pottery at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. Says Mr. Edward S. Morse, who brought this collection together: “Utensils for every day life, terra cotta funeral urns, large terra cotta bowls, weights for fishing nets, brush handles, and even clothes-hooks are in Japan made of pottery. Where we use silver and other metals, or glass, in making articles for daily use, the Japanese use pottery.” He adds: “The prehistoric pottery of Japan was modeled by hand, and to-day in various parts of the empire, this ancient art is continued in its prehistoric form. There are many potters in Japan who are still at work using only the hand in making bowls, delicate tea-pots, and dishes of various kinds. The pottery vessels offered at Shinto shrines are usually made without the use of the wheel and are unglazed. The potter’s wheel was brought to Japan from Korea. The first was probably the kick-wheel used in Satsuma and other southern provinces.”

The Japanese employ not only clay but wood in methods that richly repay study. Says Mr. Ralph Adams Cram:—“In one respect Japanese architecture is unique: it is a style developed from the exigencies of wooden construction, and here it stands alone as the most perfect mode in wood the world has known. As such it must be judged, and not from the narrow canons of the West that presuppose masonry as the only building material. . . . Perhaps the greatest lesson one learns in Japan is that of the beauty of natural wood, and the right method of treating it. The universal custom of the West has been to look on wood as a convenient medium for the obtaining of ornamental form through carving and joinery, the quality of the material itself being seldom considered. In Japan the reverse is the case. In domestic work a Japanese builder shrinks from anything that would draw attention from the beauty of his varied woods. He treats them as we do precious marbles, and one is forced to confess that under his hand wood is found to be quite as wonderful a material as our expensive and hardly worked marbles. In Japan one comes to the final conclusion that stains, paints, and varnish, so far as interior work is concerned, are nothing short of artistic crimes.”[12]

In strong contrast with the art of Japan is that of Egypt; on the banks of the Nile the first buildings were of limestone, succeeded by huge structures reared from Syene granite, with no little loss in delicacy of ornamentation. It was only when marble, all but plastic under the chisel, was adopted by the Greek sculptor, that the frieze of the Parthenon could spring into life.

Here William Morris should be heard. In “Hopes and Fears for Art,” he says: “All material offers certain difficulties to be overcome and certain facilities to be made the most of. Up to a certain point you must be master of your material, but you must never be so much the master as to turn it surly, so to say. You must not make it your slave, or presently you will be its slave also. You must master it so far as to make it express a meaning, and to serve your aim at beauty. You may go beyond that necessary point for your own pleasure and amusement, and still be in the right way; but if you go on after that merely to make people stare at your dexterity in dealing with a difficult thing, you have forgotten art along with the rights of your material, and you will make not a work of art, but a mere toy; you are no longer an artist, but a juggler. The history of art gives us abundant examples and warning in this matter. First clear, steady principle, then playing with the danger, and lastly falling into the snare, mark with the utmost distinctness the times of the health, the decline, and the last sickness of art.” He illustrates this in detail from the history of mosaic in architecture.

While the modern artist duly respects the idiom of his new materials, their diversity and refinement, in granting him the utmost freedom, enable him to attain a truth of execution unknown before to-day. For writing on papyrus a brush had to be used; on vellum or paper, a pen or pencil may also be employed, tracing lines no wider than a hair. Our grandmothers were fond of sewing on a perforated card a motto or a flower in silk thread; such a sampler always had an unpleasant straightness in its outlines. When in weaving silk or linen there may be two hundred threads to the running inch instead of ten, the designer can introduce curves almost as flowing as if he were a painter. So too in architecture: the log hut was perforce straight in its every line; stone and brick made possible the arch; iron and steel are bringing in a free choice of the best lines, whether straight or curved, all with a new sprightliness, as witness the best of our office-buildings in New York, such as the Whitehall, Trinity, and Empire Buildings.

Old Forms Repeated in New Materials.

Art in its early stages seldom displays any outright invention; with all the force of habit the savage artist clings to old familiar shapes, and it is interesting to remark how dealing with a new material may lead or even oblige him to modify a traditional form. The Algonquins inhabit a country in which the birch is common. They cut and fold its bark into vessels which, when imitated in pottery, have an unusual rectangularity. In many Indian tribes it was customary to use as a water-holder the paunch of a deer or a buffalo; many ancient urns of Central America have an aperture at an upper extremity, copied from the paunch, in every case with a simplification of outline. Winged troughs of wood were undoubtedly in the mind of the man who made the earthen vessel illustrated on the next page, found in an ancient grave in Arkansas. As usual the borrower put something of himself into his work, reminding us that the law of evolution is descent with modification. An earthen vessel, illustrated on the next page, was plainly copied from a shell vessel such as the specimen found not far off, in Indiana. When the Clallam Indians, of the State of Washington, began to weave baskets, they imitated the forms of their rude wicker fish-traps. The like persistence was shown by the Haida squaws when taught by the missionaries to make mats from rags; they repeated their ancient twined model, long employed for mats and hats of vegetable fibres. As in America, so also in Europe; when the makers of celts passed from stone to copper or bronze, they reproduced the old forms, and only gradually learned to economize metal, so much stronger than stone, and so much harder to get, by narrowing and flattening their new weapons and tools.