ABOUT CARPENTERS. 237 



cumbent 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 Caesar'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 majes- 

 tic 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 machin- 

 ery, may explain the locomotion of those monoliths which are seen 

 standing to this day, like giants among pygmies, at enormous dis- 

 tances from their place of origin. The English are perplexed as to 

 the best means of transporting Cleopatra's Needle to England : Ro- 

 man carpenters would have deemed it an every-day job ! 



Had Caesar 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 rectangu- 

 lar, 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, num- 

 bers of houses were a mixture of wood and stone work, with colon- 

 nades and porticoes, which we would liken somewhat to the cottages so 

 common nowadays in this country. The Gauls, too, excelled in mili- 

 tary carpentry. "When Caesar 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 



