Technics of Forestry. 473 



the typical emblem of his toil. To the majority of writers for the 

 press and scribblers of " information for the million," and " popular 

 educators," an axe is a chopper of some sort for cutting wood ; that is 

 about the extent of information they condescend to impart. Perhaps 

 it is as well : concealed ignorance does least mischief. Artists, unless 

 as accurate as Leonardo da Vinci of old, or Morland, Wilkie, 

 Herring, and Hunt of recent times, depict axes according to their 

 fancy, often but sorry displays. Constable and Turner, and similar 

 colourists, were very deficient in technical accuracy. With photography 

 to give reflex exactitude, there is no excuse for artists' blunders ; the 

 reason for the more correct delineation by old painters may be 

 assumed from the fact that they at some time used the tools they 

 painted. Leonardo da Vinci, the prince of painters, was an art 

 worker. There exists a painting of singular merit of this artist 

 stripped, with bare arms, at a blacksmith's forge, — perhaps about to 

 forge an axe. The blacksmith has put on his coat, and sits on an 

 opposite anvil, with a wicker-covered flagon of wine and drinking- 

 horn in his hands, watching the artist about to forge some ironwork ; 

 one of the blacksmith's boys is blowing the bellows, and the wife and 

 two other children are spectators of the painter-blacksmith, who it 

 is known could forge a horseshoe, and by sheer strength of arm and 

 hands could straighten it out. But to return to the woodman's axe, 

 its illustration No. 3 shows its best form of construction for hard 

 woods : — oak, ash, beech, elm, hornbeam, walnut, chestnut, &c., of 

 the temperate zones, or for the harder woods of the tropics and 

 Australia, as may be noticed in illustrations of axes used by the 

 wood-hewers of those regions. 



The head is shown to be a pear-shaped ellipse, the crown being twice 

 the thickness of the sides of the elliptical head. This is essential, 

 not only because the head of the axe is used as a sledge-hammer for 

 breaking off or down a piece of timber, driving a wedge, &c., but to 

 resist the strain on the head when used properly as an axe. If the 

 head be thin at this part, the jar will cause a fracture here. This 

 is the part, in this shaped axe, where the iron is welded together to 

 form the eye of the axe. The length of the head from back to front 

 is but little less than that of the cutting edge from " point " to " lieel," 

 so that the handle has a very secure fixture in the head, and is not 

 liable to get loose if well fitted in, — for it must be fitted in well, and be 

 driven in not too tightly, or the head will be opened at the slit of the 

 oval. An iron wedge is driven into the end of the handle, at right 

 angles to the axe-head, as shown in No. 4; it is not wide enough to touch 

 the iron anywhere: this wedge is about two inches long, and is mostly 

 jagged at the edges to make it hold well into the handle. 



The cutting edge of the axe is of steel laid on (as the term is for 



