396 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Bronze, though it becomes a blackish green, has this advan- 

 tage for the decoration of buildings, that it can be reproduced as 

 often as you please from the modeled clay of the statuary. You 

 may, therefore, get through its means first-rate work at low cost, 

 if the repetition is great, and its use may be called benevolent as 

 well, for it does not condemn skillful men to the brainless work 

 of constantly reproducing the same thing. 



It is needless to speak of wrought iron, which can be made into 

 any form you like, and of any size and thickness, from the stem 

 of an anchor to a leaf, and chased or engraved, polished or 

 lacquered, tinned or gilt. I am happy to say that wrought-iron 

 work is receiving great attention again both from architects, 

 painters, and iron-workers, and can be made nearly as well as it 

 ever could. I think cast iron has been needlessly depreciated and 

 needlessly neglected in this truly iron age. You can not get the 

 fineness of bronze, and you can not chase it, but you can get really 

 beautiful work done in it, and the wit of man can never be better 

 employed than in using good materials at hand in the proper 

 way i. e., by only asking them to do what they can do readily 

 and properly. As far as I know, the only real drawback to cast 

 iron is its liability to rust. If Mr. Barff's process can be applied 

 cheaply and will resist the attacks of the atmosphere for a long 

 time, all we have to put up with is blackness, and, if the parts 

 of a front we must have blank were filled in with glass slabs, 

 you need have very little more black than you want. 



Cast iron is a difficult material to use I mean it wants to be 

 calculated for its strength, it requires much thought to ornament, 

 and everything, even to a bolt-hole, has to be settled beforehand, 

 and, except there is much repetition, it is costly. Its neglect is 

 greatly owing to this, that no one will pay for the extra skill, 

 time, and trouble required of the architect, so this admirable 

 material is almost ignored. 



As regards marble, I can not quite agree with M. Charles Gar- 

 nier, that " even when it has lost its polish it still looks like a 

 shabby gentleman, and is not to be mistaken for a vulgar fellow 

 in his Sunday clothes/' Except in rainy weather, when the mar- 

 ble is temporarily polished by the wet, its unpolished surface, in 

 my opinion, can not be regarded as worth the outlay ; and I say 

 this with hesitation and regret, for the exquisite harmonies pro- 

 duced by the decayed marble of St. Mark's was a thing to be re- 

 membered ; still, as an architect, I can not reconcile myself to 

 using a precious material merely to give a flavor when I know 

 that, in giving it, it is going to decay ; I might, perhaps, if I were 

 a painter. But for the inside of a building marble is the richest 

 material you have for the production of lovely color music 

 without words painted as it is by Nature's hand, with every 



