AMERICAN INSTITUTE, 47l 



a g-ood artist can work on and improve. Many members showed their 

 strong approbation of the new process. 



The Chairman now called up the regular subject: " Building Materials 

 of the State of New York." 



Prof. Mason. — Inquiry in this matter has proven to me how little I knew 

 about it, and the very extensive field opening before us for research. We 

 want full knowledge. Let us not rest contented in our ignorance of so 

 important a subject! Nature has placed us on the criist of earthy and we 

 find it composed of many forms of matter, very various, and not yet well 

 understood — matter o7ice disintegrated and then reformed^ rendered solid, 

 not homogeneous, even in granites, still less in composite rocks. The 

 Plutonic rocks, (the unstratified crystalline rocks, formed deep in the earth, 

 subjected to high heat, and then upheaved through the stratified system of 

 the surface,) and the volcanic rocks, (heated by fire and cooled near the 

 surface.) All these demand strict examination. Art can chemically com- 

 bine matter so as to form homogeneous matter entirely different from 

 natural bodies — forming new substances. Some naughty boys are finding 

 fault with Moses I If we do not understand his cosmogony, and don't learn 

 how it was made his way., we must try to find it out by our learning ! 

 Naughty boys, as we surely are ! 



We read the great writers on building, and must now laugh at some of 

 great name. We read Vitruvius on mortar, and laugh heartily at his igno- 

 rance ! A building on the corner of John and Pearl streets had been first 

 made with much iron ; then changed to granite ! then back again to iron, 

 and has cost much more than the land it stands on is worth ! It seems to 

 require thi*ee things to make a man : tvtfe, child, and build a house ! 



Mr. Meigs.^ — The learned professor forgets that Vitruvius is compara- 

 tively one of us I living some centuries after the great Grecian architects — 

 at a period when an approach to the dark ages, when all manner of fantas- 

 tic edifices were built — {pretty much as we do noiv,) and with that the loss 

 of letters, so that many Kings could not write their own names — and where 

 a criminal that could write, was acquitted because he could, by the plea of 

 benefit of Clergy (Clerkship.) 



The unburned bricks of the East would not stand our climate. Clau- 

 dius James Rich, the learned Consul of England, at Bagdad, 40 years ago, 

 examined that subject in the reputed town of Babel. lawk Kezra, of 

 Selucia, and the mounds of Nineveh, which he first made known, as build- 

 ings reduced on the surface to common earth — and, as he supposed, con- 

 taining great treasures of art. 



Mr. Stetson remarked that Adams, of England, was one of our best 

 tutors in this matter. That all building material demands study ; that no 

 two blocks, even of granite, were exactly alike. A common workman on 

 buildings, being questioned closely as to his materials, returns very little 

 and indistinct information. He says not much more than " It is because 

 it is so.'''' An engineer must study to utilize every thing. The chemist 

 must have the rationale. Conflicting judgments must be decided by scie?ice, 



