veneer cut by the circular method, a difference
which cabinet-makers and pianoforte-makers
are not disposed to put up with.

If we cut our wood for unadorned furniture
or for carpentry purposes, instead of for
veneered elegancies, the smaller circular saws
are employed, and these move with prodigious
velocity. Eighteen hundred revolutions in a
minute is not an unusual speed for these saws;
and it requires no very recondite arithmetic
to show, that if a saw eighteen inches in
diameter rotates at this rate, every point in its
circumference travels more than a mile and a
half in a minute—a speed that gives the go-by
to any of our double-first, long-bodied, many-tubed,
eight-wheeled locomotives. We could
get to the Diggings in a fortnight at this
rate, were it not for the provoking circumstance
that the saw-teeth "return to the
place from whence they came," and end each
day's journey within half a yard of the point
of its commencement.

But it is not only in respect to sawing that
the steam-engine now assists us in our wood-cutting
operations; it planes our timber, and
makes mouldings and mortices and grooves,
and rebates and tenons, and other cuts and
quirks, necessary for fitting up structures in
timber. The planing machines are not of such
long standing as the saw-mills: they are only
of boys' age yet. The cutting-tools with
which the wood is planed do not move along
its surface; but the wood travels up to the
tools. It is generally for flooring-boards that
timbers are thus placed; and—on the well-known
principle of making the best show we
can in the world at the least possible expense
—one side is better planed than the other,
of course to occupy the uppermost place. In
making mouldings on the surface of a board
or other piece of timber—whether the moulding
be called an "ogee " or an "ovalo,"a
"bead" or a "fillet," a "hollow" or a
"bevel"—the process differs from planing
rather in the forms of the cutting-tools, than
in anything else. Some of these tools are
fixed, and oppose a steady but sharp front to
the wood as it approaches; but others rotate
on their axes with enormous rapidity, and
cut away the wood in a shower of little
fragments. Some of the machines are so
constructed as to cut into the wood to a depth
of twelve or even eighteen inches, sufficient
to form gutters and troughs, and such like.
A whole plank may be thus "moulded"
in a time very little exceeding one minute.

How we cut our wood was well illustrated
in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. There
were no less than six hundred thousand cubic
feet of timber in that wonderful structure;
and if the sawyers and carpenters and joiners
had been allowed to fashion this wood according
to their old-school manner, the First of
May would have found the building scarcely
above the ground. The flooring of the main
area and galleries was to be measured by
acres rather than by square feet; to talk of a
million square feet of flooring somewhat
bewilders one; but if we remember that
this equals twenty-three acres, the bewilderment
of confusion gives way to the
bewilderment of vastness. All these acres of
boards were of course prepared by steam
power. A very ingenious machine was
employed for adzing and planing the wood at the
same time; the plank (about an inch and a
half thick) was moved slowly along a kind of
table, and was tortured by two corps of
enemies at once—the one above, and the other
below; the upper cutters were adzes, which
roughly levelled one side; while the lower
cutters were plane-irons, which properly
smoothed the other side. How the sash-bars
and Paxton gutters were cut, we described in
our Private History of the Palace of Glass
(Vol. ii. page 385).

But what of the lucifers? Germany is a
formidable competitor with us in this curious
manufacture. There are shops in the
metropolis at which foreign toys and carvings and
trinkets are sold in great variety; and it is
impossible to look at the light-matches in
these shops without acknowledging that our
German neighbours turn out their work in a
neat-handed way. Our English lucifers or
Congreves are square-shafted; those of Germany
are cylindrical; being nice little wooden rods.
We have invested one halfpenny in the
purchase of a box of these productions for the
sake of analysis, and we find that it contains
ninety-three matches, all nicely rounded and
fully tipped with the ignifying composition.
The box which contains them is a regularly
turned cylindrical box, all for one halfpenny,
after paying the expenses of transit from the
centre of Germany to London! In Saxony
undipped matches, two inches in length, can
be bought for five thalers per million—about
fourteen hundred for a farthing—while the
very cheapest empty boxes for these matches
are sold for twopence per hundred. At
Schüttenhofen in Bohemia, tipped matches,
boxes and all, containing eighty matches in
each box, are sold at one penny for a dozen
boxes. At Neudorf in Bohemia, the match
splints are sold at one-third of a kreutzer per
bundle of one thousand, or at the rate of
two thousand two hundred and fifty for an
English farthing. Another maker, Fürth of
Neudeck, sells bundles of untipped splints,
with twenty-five thousand in a bundle, for
five kreutzers, equal to three thousand eight
hundred and fifty for a farthing. We take
these particulars from the Official Priced
Catalogue of the German department of the
late Exhibition. The astounding cheapness
might lead us to suspect either typographical
error or trading exaggeration, or both; but
there are many corroborative circumstances
which lead us to rely on the fidelity of these
entries, and our only resource is to marvel at
the cheapness of the wood, and of the labour
by which such results could alone be
produced.