S90 
Brkk-Making. 
way ; but these are light, full of cracks, and spongy, 
owing to the want of due working and management i 
and the mixing of ashes which is now the uniform prac- 
tice about London, and light sandy earth which is 
usually practised in the country, to make them work 
easy, and with greater dispatch, serves also to save coals 
or wood in the burning them. 
The excellency of bricks consists chiefly in the first and 
last operation ; for bricks made of good earth, and well 
tempered, become solid and ponderous, and therefore will 
take up a longer time in drying and burning than our 
common bricks seem to require. It is also to be observ- 
ed that the well drying of bricks, before they are burned, 
prevents cracking and crumbling in their burning ; for 
when the bricks are too wet, the parts are prevented from 
adhering together. The best way of ordering the fire is, 
to make it gentle at first, and increase it by degrees as the 
bricks grow harder. If those several operations were 
properly and duly attended to we should not see such im- 
mense waste, and so great a profusion of unburnt and half 
burnt bricks, called place bricks, as we constantly find on 
the outsides of our modern clamps. For want of due precau- 
tion the fire never reaches them in an equable degree, and 
therefore they ought to be totally disregarded and laid 
aside ; but modern ingenuity, and the tricks of the build- 
ers, have found out a mode of using them less objection- 
able to be sure than if they were consigned to the outside 
walls, though properly they are not fit to be used any 
where. It is necessary that the public should be inform- 
ed, that these place bricks are now made use of in the in- 
side walls of houses of every denomination, from the hut 
to the palace ; and that they are soft, subject to very 
quick-decay, and wherever wet can at all get to them, 
they moulder away with great rapidity ; nor is this the on- 
ly objection to them.; tliey are subject to be acted upon 
