274 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECTS JOURNAL. 



[August, 



ON OBLIQUE ARCHES.— MR. BUCK IN REPLY TO MR. 

 NICHOLSON. 



SiK — After tlie floiirisli wliich has appeared in your last Journal from 

 the pen of Mr. Peter Nicliolson, I trust to your candour for the inser- 

 tion of the following remarks thereon. With them I have sent a copy 

 of my reply to him whicdi was [jublished in the Railway Magazine on 

 the 25th of January last. I have sent it for the purpose of begging 

 the favour of your giving it a place in the Civil Engineer and Archi- 

 tect's Journal, immediately after this, because without it the corres- 

 pondence is incomplete, ami neither Mr. Nicholson's letter nor my ob- 

 servations thereon can be properly understood by those who have not 

 seen the former : and the republication of my letter of that date is the 

 more necessarv, inasmuch as Mr. Nicholson in several instances has 

 repeated mistakes which were saii^factvrily exposed, to every one 

 except himself, in that reply. Relying therefore on your doing so I 

 will proceed. 



It may be first proper to state that since my " Essay on Oblique 

 Bridges" made its ap])earance, Mr. Nicholson has published on the 

 same subject, his "Guide to Railway Masonry," in the commencement 

 of which he has very freely criticised the works of others as well as 

 mine, and if he had done so ably and impartially, I should have had 

 nothing to complain of; but it will be seen by referring to my former 

 letter that he had affected not to have had sufficient leisure to read 

 the work; is it therefore to be wondered at that he should have fallen 

 into errors in criticising it ? From the tone of his remarks it is quite 

 obvious that the first and great offence wdiich I have committed in his 

 sight, is the fact of my having published anything on that subject, 

 which he appears to claim exclusively as his own: the second unpar- 

 donable offence is the fact of my having, in reply to him, in the Rail- 

 way Magazine, exposed and refuted the errors into which he had 

 fallen, by putting forth his imaginary "inconsistencies in certain for- 

 mula." 



Mr. Nicholson has chosen to sit in judgment upon others and made 

 the preface to his book, where no one could reply to him, the vehicle 

 of his denunciations: and I chose to set the jniblic and himself right 

 upon the subject, so far as I was concerned, by replying to him else- 

 where, for which purpose I selected a Journal extensively circulated, 

 and almost exclusively devoted to railway business. 



In the latter part of Mr. Nicholson's address, he tells your readers 

 he "has given vent to his feelings at the ingratitude which Mr. Buck 

 has shewn." Therefore, before advancing any further, I beg to ob- 

 serve, I know nothing of Mr. Nicholson except through his writings, I 

 have never seen him, nor have I ever had any correspondence with 

 him except tliis. 



In the introduction to my Essay I made mention of him in the fol- 

 lowing terms. 



"In Nicholson's work on stone cutting, published in 1S28, the me- 

 thod of constructing oblique arches with spiral courses is briefly ex- 

 plained, and to it we are indebted for the first principles of the art, 

 but it does not enter sufficiently into detail. Having stated thus much, 

 the author will not hesitate to make use of the principles set forlh in 

 that work without further acknowledgement; at the same time it is 



E roper to mention, that the matter which may be found common to 

 oth, does not extend beyond a small portion of the first and third 

 chapters of this Essay." Surely any one but Mr. Nicholson would 

 have been satisfied with this. 



Alluding to the templates Mr. Nicholson has also given " vent to his 

 feelings," and made use of the following reprehensible language. 

 "Now, Sir, that Mr. Buck should have made these assertions is, tome, 

 a matter of the utmost surprise, seeing that he must have known, when 

 he made them, that he was de:iberately stating that which was incor- 

 rect." 



Here Mr. Nichol?on has put himself out of the pale of civilised so- 

 ciety, and I most uneqiiivocally repel his accusation, and conscientiously 

 reassert the truth of every word contained in my reply, to wliich he 

 refers. Mr. Nicholson will be disappointed if after this he looks for 

 very gentle criticism at my hands. 



In Mr. Nicholson's letter he has laboured very hard to show that the 

 strictures contained in my reply of last January were erroneous; but I 

 am under the necessity of declaring he has completely failed in the 

 attempt, and moreover that every thing stated by me remains imre- 

 futed, as an attentive reference thereto will make apparent. He has 

 taken especial pains to rebut the following : "this dilemma leads me 

 to infer that Mr. Nicholson is not practically familiar with the subject 

 upon which he has written." And probably it will astonish many when 

 I say that Mr. Nicholson has, but very unintentionally no doubt, 

 confessed that I was correct in coming to such a conclusion; a conclu- 

 sion at which I arrived from the internal evidence afforded by his 



writings. He now says in his defence, "I have seen nine Oblique 

 Bridges on the Newcastle and North Shields Railway, and fi'v( on the 

 Brandling Junction Railway, all executed in stone on the principle 

 laid <lown by me, making, upon the two railways /uurUcn bridges within 

 a distance of about eight miles of Newcastle, and built, as it weke, 

 under my own immediate inspection." This is precisely what I ex- 

 pected ; it is a confession that he is " no/ practicullij/cmiliar icith the 

 tiuhjtct on U'hich he has icrilltn." He "has xuii" fourteen oblique 

 bridges built within eight miles of Newcastle, and there are thousands 

 of la<lies and gentlemen as well as others who can say so likewise. 



Mr. Nicholson is highly indignant at my having stated that he 

 adopted from ray " Essaj'," the correct method of showing the joints 

 in the elevation of the face of an oblique arch. Here I beg to observe 

 that the method shown in his work on "Stone Cutting," is erroneous: 

 in his "Guide" he has given that, and added the other which I con- 

 sidered him to have " adopted." No doubt it is just possible he might 

 have found it out by watching the progress of the fourteen bridges 

 wdiich he has teen near Newcastle. 



Mr. Nicholson exclaims against his having adopted anything as fol- 

 lows : " even if I had been driven to such a strait as to think of, or to 

 stoop to such a thing:" and he also reminds me that "facts are stub- 

 born things." Well, be it so. I think the following is internal evi- 

 dence afforded by his "Guide," of his having been driven to such a 

 "strait." In my " Essay " reference is made to a line which I have 

 denominated the " jlxial kng/h." This term never appeared in any 

 previous work of Mr. Nicholson's, or of any other writer, and I coined 

 the word axial to suit the occasion : it is not to be found in any dic- 

 tionary : but it is found in Mr. Nicholson's recent work, and he has 

 thought proper to insert its signification in his "Descriptive Defini- 

 tions." 



Nearly at the beginning of his letter he says : " I have examined the 

 third chapter of Mr. Buck's Essay, and lean find no method explaining 

 the making of the curved edges of the templates Nos. 1 and 2, plate 

 26, in ray work, to which I refer when I say they are not shown by any 

 other author who has written on the subject : and I have also examined 

 the fifth plate in his 'Essay' which Mr. Buck says contains eight dia- 

 grams exhibiting the form of these temjilates, and I have been equally 

 disappointed, for I can find no such templates exhibited. Mr. Buck 

 does not even show how the radius of curvature of these templates 

 may be found ; neither does he give a hint that they are necessary." 



Mr. Nicholson appears to state by the above that I have not given 

 diagrams for the too ^art/ew/a)' templates : this is true, because that 

 exhibited by figure 13, in my Essay, and which is very unlike any of 

 his, renders those particular templates unnecessary, and if he were 

 " practically familiar with the subject," he would have discoveretl that 

 fact, and would have been able to see that it is a much more efficient 

 instrument than those, the omission of which appears to have-so much 

 disturbed him. For the same reason I have not shown " how the radius 

 of curvature of those omitted templates may be found," namely, be- 

 cause it is not necessary. 



Here I will make a remark which I should not have done had not 

 Mr. Nicholson brought the subject under my immediate notice ; and it 

 is that the method given by him for finding the radius referred to is 

 fallacious ; but the intolerance manifested by him excludes him from 

 the privilege of being put right. 



Mr. Nicholson quotes my statement as to the difficulty of finding a 

 demonstration for the curious property of the mutual convergence of 

 the chords of the curves of the joints of the face of the arch, and then 

 adds most illogically: "This, Sir, I consider to be a sufficient admis- 

 sion of the justness of my remarks, and one which renders it perfectly 

 unnecessary for me to allude further to those remarks at this time." 

 Now it so happens that Mr. Nicholson had never made any remarks 

 upon this subject, it being absolutely impossible for hira to have done 

 so, inasmuch as he was previously perfectly ignorant of the facts, and 

 of the property for w hich a demonstration was sought. He has garbled 

 the quotation and misapplied it. I went on to say that subsequently 

 to the publication of the '■ Essay," a friend of mine had found one, a 

 beautiful geometrical demonstration ; it has not been published how- 

 ever, and 1 challenge Mr. Nicholson to produce one. 



Mr. Nicholson draws a comparison between his work and mine in 

 the following words. 



" Mr. Buck's work is only intended for the use of those who may 

 happen to have been trained in a proper course of mathematical study, 

 and which, I believe, is not the case with a tithe of the young men, 

 for whose use chiefly, Mr. B. has written his book. On the other 

 hand, mine is intended as a purely practical work, and as such, I have 

 shown in it how every useful length, distance, or angle of an oblique 

 arch may be found, principally by common arithmetic, from the doc- 

 trine of similar triangles." 



The young men who are rising in the engineering profession no 



