SCIENCE 
IS 
KNOWLEDGE 
KNOWLEDGE 
IS 
POWER, 
A PRACTICAL JOURNAL OF 
HOME ARTS. 
YoL. YI. 
NEW YORK, MARCH, 1883. 
No. 3. 
Amateur Wood Carving. 
BY LEO PARSLEY. 
T is not necessary 
that the amateur 
carver should have 
a thorough knowl- 
edge of the various 
styles of decorative 
art, still it is desir- 
able that he should 
have a fair idea of 
the distinctive 
features of each 
style. While it is 
not the intention of 
the writer to fully 
explain each characteristic of every style, 
it is thought necessary to describe briefly 
the main features of some of the historic 
styles of ornament. 
OrnamePxtal styles may be broadly di- 
vided into two great classes— the symbolic 
and the cesthetic ; the elements of style 
are also of two kinds, the pure and abso- 
lute, and the conventional and arbitrarv : 
or natural and fanciful. There are also 
two provinces of ornament— the flat and 
the round; in the former we have a con- 
trast of light and dark, in the latter a 
contrast of light and shade. It is with the 
latter that we have most to deal with in 
wood carving, and the amateur should 
always bear in mind that the two great 
principles he has to study most particu- 
larly are shape and contrast. 
In most cases where imitations from 
nature, such as flowers or fruit, are intro- 
duced into a design, they should be used 
as accessory decorations, and not as prin- 
cipals, otherwise there is a risk of substi- 
tuting the ornament itself for the object 
to be ornamented, and in every case orna- 
ment is essentially the accessory to, and 
not the substitute of, the useful. As the 
motive of ornament is to render the object 
ornamented agreeable to the eye, the de- 
tails of the decoration should be kept 
purely subservient to the beauty of effect. 
Let me here caution the amateur never to 
overload his design with a multix)licity of 
details, as by so doing he increases the 
labor of production, and at the same time 
spoils the effect of tlie design as a whole. 
Symmetry is such an important ele- 
ment in decoration that it must never be 
