622 
S A W 
S A W 
5 A W 
there are four germina, and four monosper- 
mous berries. There is'one species, a herb 
of Virginia. 
SAU VAGESIA, a genus of the monogy- 
nia order, in the pentandria class of points ; 
and in the natural method ranking with those 
of which the order is doubtful. The corolla 
is pentapetalous and fringed ; the calyx pen- 
taphvllous; the nectarium the same, having 
its leaves placed alternately with the petals; 
the capsule unilocular. There is one spe- 
cies. a native of St. Domingo. 
SAW, an instrument which serves to cut 
into pieces several solid matters ; as wood, 
stone, ivory, &c. The best saws are of tem- 
pered steel ground bright and smooth ; those 
of iron are only hammer-hardened : hence, 
the first, besides their being stiffer, are like- 
wise found smoother than the last. They 
are known to be well hammered by the stiff 
bending of the blade ; and to be well and 
evenly ground, by their bending equally in a 
bow. The edge in which are the teeth is al- 
ways thicker than the back, because the 
back is to follow the edge. The teeth are 
cut and sharpened with a triangular file, the 
blade of the saw being first fixed in a whet- 
ting-block. After they have been filed the 
teeth are set, that is, turned out of the right 
line, that they may make the kerf or fissure 
the wider, that the back may follow the bet- 
ter. The teeth are always set ranker for 
coarse cheap stuff than for hard and fine, be- 
cause the ranker the teeth are set, the more 
stuff is lost in the kerf. The saws by which 
marble and other stories, are cut, have no 
teeth: these are generally very large, and 
are stretched out and held even by a frame. 
The lapidaries, too, have their saw, as well 
as the workmen in mosaic; but of all me- 
chanics, none have so many saws as the join- 
ers; the chief are as follows: The pit-saw, 
which is a large two-handed saw, used to saw 
timber in pits ; this is chiefly used by the 
sawyers. The whip-saw, which is also two- 
handed, used in sawing such large pieces of 
■stuff as the hand-saw will not easily reach. 
The hand-saw, which is made for a single 
man’s use, of which there are various kinds ; 
as the bow, or frame saw, which is furnished 
with cheeks: by the twisted cords which pass 
from the upper parts of these cheeks, and the 
tongue in the middle of them, the upper ends 
are drawn closer together, and the lower set 
further apart. The tenon-saw, which being 
very thin, has aback to keep it from bending. 
The compass-saw, which is very small, and 
its teeth usually not set: its use is to cut a 
round, or any other compass-kerf: hence the 
edge is made broad, and the back thin, that it 
may have a compass to turn in. 
SAW-MILLS. In early periods, the 
trunks of trees were split with wedges into as 
many and as thin pieces as possible ; and if it 
was necessary to have them still thinner, they 
were hewn on both sides to the proper size. 
This simple and wasteful manner of mak- 
ing boards has been still continued in some i 
places, to the present time. Peter the j 
Great of Russia endeavoured to put a stop : 
to it, by forbidding hewn deals to be trans- < 
parted on the river Neva. The saw, how- 
ever, though so convenient and beneficial, ’ 
has not been able to banish entirely the 
practice of splitting timber used in build- 
ing, or in making furniture and utensils, for 
we do not speak here of fire-wood; and, 
indeed, it must be allowed that this method 
is attended with peculiar advantages, which 
that of sawing can never possess. The wood- 
splitters perform their work more expedi- 
tiously than sawyers, and split timber is much 
stronger than that which has been sawn; for 
the fissure follows the grain of the wood, and 
leaves it whole; whereas the saw, which pro- 
ceeds in the line chalked out for it, divides 
the fibres, and by these means lessens its co- 
hesion and solidity. Split timber, indeed, 
turns out often crooked and warped; but in 
many purposes to which it is applied this is 
not prejudicial ; and these faults may some- 
times be amended. As the fibres, however, 
retain their natural length and direction, thin 
i boards, particularly, can be bent much bet- 
ter. This is a great advantage in making 
pipe-staves, or sieve-frames, which require 
still more art, and in forming various imple- 
ments of the like kind. 
Our common saw, which needs only to be 
guided by the hand of the workman, how- 
ever simple it may be, was not known to the 
inhabitants of America when they were sub- 
dued by the Europeans. The inventor of 
this instrument has by the Greeks been in- 
serted in their mythology, with a place in 
which, among their gods, they honoured the 
greatest benefactors of the earliest ages. By 
some he is called Talus, and by others Per- 
dix. Pliny alone ascribes the invention to 
Daedalus; but Harclouiu, in the passage 
where he does so, chooses to read Talus ra- 
ther than Disdains. Diodorus Siculus, Apoi- 
lodorus, and others, name the inventor Talus. 
He was the son of Dzedalus’s sister; and was 
by his mother placed under the tuition of her 
brother, to be instructed in his art. Having 
once found the jaw-bone of a snake, he em- 
ployed it to cut. through a small piece of 
Wood; and by these means was induced to 
form a like instrument of iron, that is, to 
make a saw. This invention, which greatly 
facilitates labour, excited the envy of his 
master, and instigated him to put Talus to 
death privately. We are told, that being 
asked by some one, when he was burying the 
body, what he was depositing in the earth, he 
replied, “A serpent.” JThis suspicious answer 
discovered the murder; and thus, adds the 
historian, a snake was the cause of the in- 
vention, of the murder, and of its being found 
out. 
Others call the inventor Perdix. That he 
was the son of a sister of Dsedalus they ail 
agree; but they differ respecting the name of 
his parents. The mother is by Fulgentius 
called Polycastes, but without any proof; 
and Lactantius gives to the father the name of 
Calaus. In Apollodorus, however, the mo- 
ther of Talus is called Perdix; and the same 
name is given by Tzetzes to the mother of 
the inventor, whose name Talus he changes 
into Attains. Perdix, we are told, did not 
employ for a saw the jaw-bone of a snake, 
like Talus, but the back-bone of a fish; 'and 
this is confirmed by Ovid, who, nevertheless, 
is silent respecting the name ot the inventor. 
The saws of the Grecian carpenters had the 
same form, and were made in the like ingeni- 
ous manner as ours are at present. This is 
fully shewn by a painting still preserved 
among the antiquities of Herculaneum. Two 
genii are represented at the end of a bench, 
which consists of a long table that rests upon 
10 
two four-footed stools. The piece of wood 
which is to be sawn through is secured by 
cramps. The saw with v/hich the genii are 
at work lias a perfect resemblance to our 
frame-saw. It consists of a square frame, 
having in the middle a blade, the teeth of 
which stand perpendicular to the plane of the 
frame. The piece of wood which is to be 
sawn extends beyond the end of the bench, 
and one of the w orkmen appeal’s standing, 
and the other sitting on the ground The 
arms, in which the blade is fastened, have the 
same form as that given to them at present. 
In the bench are seen holes, in which the 
cramps that hold the timber are struck, 
t hey are shaped like the figure 7; and 
the ends of them reach below the boards that 
form the top of it. 
The most beneficial and ingenious im- 
provement of this instrument was, without 
doubt, the invention of saw-mills, which are 
driven either by water or by the wind. Mills 
ot the first kind were erected so early as the 
fourth century, in Germany, on the small 
river Roeur or Ruer: for though Ausonius 
speaks properly of water-mills for cutting 
stone, and not timber, it cannot be doubted 
that these were invented later than mills for 
manufacturing deals, or that both kinds 
were erected at the same time. The art, 
however, of entriag marble with a saw is very 
old. Pliny conjectures that it was invented 
in Faria ; at least he knew no building in- 
crusted with marble of greater antiquity than 
tjie palace of king Mausolus, at Halicarnassus, 
i his edifice is celebrated by Vitruvius, for 
the beauty of its marble ; and Pliny gives an 
account of the different kinds of sand used for 
cutting it ; tor it is the sand properly, says he, 
and not the saw, which produces that effect. 
'I he latter presses down the former, and rubs 
it against the marble; and the coarser the 
sand is, the longer will be the time required 
to polish the marble which lias been cut by 
it. Stones of the soap -rock kind, which are 
indeed softer than marble, and which would 
require less force than wood, were sawn at 
that period: but it appears that the far harder 
glassy kinds of stone were sawn then also ; 
for we are told of the discovery of a building 
which was encrusted with cut agate, carne- 
iian, lapis lazuli, and amethysts. We have, 
however, found no account in any of the 
Greek or Roman writers of a mill for sawing 
wood; and as the writers of modern times 
speak of saw-mills as new and uncommon, it 
would seem that the oldest construction of 
them has been forgotten, or that some import- 
ant improvement has made them appear en- 
tirely new. 
Becher says, with his usual confidence, that 
saw-mills were invented in the 17th century, 
lu this he erred, for when the infant Henry 
sent settlers to the island of Madeira, which 
was discovered in 1420, and caused Euro- 
pean fruits of every kind to be carried thither, 
he ordered saw-mills to be erected also, for 
the purpose of sawing into deals the various 
species of excellent timber with which the 
island abounded, and which were afterwards 
transported to Portugal. About the year 
1427 the city of Breslau had a saw-mill 
which produced a yearly rent of three 
marks; and in 1490 the magistrates of Erfurt 
purchased a forest, in which they caused a 
saw-mill to be erected, and they" rented an- 
other mill in the neighbourhood besides. 
