economy; for, in the one case, you only use
precisely what you want, while in the other
you use more than you want. When Mr.
Jones, having reached the summit of his
earthly desires in obtaining the consent of
Miss Smith to marry him (and also the
consent of Mr. Pater Smith, and Mrs. Mater
Smith), looks out for tables, chairs, and other
et ceteras, wherewith to furnish that desirable
cottage residence in which the happy couple
are to take up their abode in the company of
love and a young servant, he pays more for
these household comforts (meaning thereby,
the tables, chairs, &c.) than he otherwise
would pay, because of the waste of material
necessitated in their construction. The case,
however, is not now as it was formerly. In a
happy moment, some mechanical genius
bethought him of a process of bending timber
by the application of heat to it.

Like the Reform Bill, however, it was
only a step; and, if any old toryfied engineer
with a dream of finality in his mind, had
regarded the success already achieved as the
summum bonum of such matters, Mr. Jones
not to speak of Mrs. Jones would have
had a right to quarrel with him. For Jones
might have called his attention to the fact
that the timber had a tendency to a debilitated
constitution, very awkward in those
articles of furniture whereof the first requisite
is strength; that it was weak and
fragile, not unfrequently breaking under a
moderate pressure, and sometimes absolutely
unbending and returning to primitive
straightness, like a young lady's carefully
got-up curls on a damp day. All this
Mr. Jones might have exhibited out of
direful experience; but, of the reason—the
cause of the effect —he would probably have
been ignorant. The explanation, however,
is not very abstruse. In the ordinary process
of bending, the fibre is strained. Thus,
any curved piece of wood is weakest in the
sharpest part of the curve. Scientific men,
indeed, have argued that, for practical purposes,
great curves are impossible; and they
have defined their theory thus:—To bend a
piece of wood, you must extend the outer
circumference and compress the inner. Now
as wood is inexpansible, you cannot bend it
without injuring the fibre, and consequently
weakening the whole mass.

Such was the orthodox theory; but, in the
same way that the knowing ones on the race-
course often make the most astounding
mistakes in their forecastings to their own great
pecuniary disadvantage and the edification of
a censorious world, so will it frequently occur
that professed scientific men, too mindful of
abstract theories to make practical innovations,
find themselves suddenly confronted
with some new application of those theories,
or some complete reversal of them. These
audacious exhibitions of scientific heterodoxy
have of late years been more common in
America than elsewhere. The active, volatile,
knowing States' man is as little disposed to
submit to antiquated authority in intellectual
matters as in political affairs. He will not
have an hereditary monarchy, guarded with
fictions of divine right in the regions of
discovery, any more than in the physical
territories which he occupies. He will have an
elective president in the Republic of Ideas;
and he will reserve to himself entire liberty
to set him aside when his time for being
useful has gone by. Every man in that
republic shall have a vote; and the best
candidate shall carry the day. Therefore
has it come to pass that Jonathan,
disregarding the assertion that wood cannot be
bent without weakening the fibre, has set
to work to see how he can overcome
the difficulty, and has discovered a method
which, to judge from the accounts given by
the most eminent engineers, both of America
and England, will be of the greatest service
in ship-building and domestic architecture,
and in the construction of all pieces of furniture
in which, it is necessary to employ
curved timber. It has been already so
employed in the United States, where a Roman
Catholic cathedral is surmounted by a dome
fashioned out of wood bent by the new
process. This dome has been found to be
lighter, stronger, cheaper, and more elegant,
than the domes usually formed of metal,
brick, and papier-maché.

By this invention, which has been patented
in America, and is now just introduced into
England, the strength of the wood is
increased at least seventy-five per cent, at the
point where strength is most required. The
curve, moreover, never relaxes. The timber,
as in the old process, is first subjected to
the influence of steam, which softens the
whole mass, and puts it in a fit state for the
action of a machine. The principle of
bending, as employed in this new application,
is based on end-pressure, which, in condensing
and turning at the same time, destroys the
capillary tubes by forcing them into each
other. These tubes are only of use when the
tree is growing; and their amalgamation
increases the density of the timber, the pressure
being so nicely adjusted that the wood is
neither flattened nor spread, nor is the outer
circumference of the wood expanded, though
the inner is contracted. Now, the error of
the former process, as expounded by
competent judges, has arisen from the
disintegrating of the fibre of the wood by expanding
the whole mass over a rigid mould. Wood
can be more easily compressed than
expanded; therefore, it is plain that a process
which induces a greater closeness in the
component parts of the piece under operation—
which, as it were, locks up the whole mass
by knitting the fibres together—must
augment the degree of hardness and power of
resistance. The wood thus becomes almost
impervious to. damp and to the depredations
of insects, while its increased density renders