ART. IV.-1. English Pleasure Carriages. By W. Bridges Adams. 8vo. London, 1837.

2. The Hub. A Monthly Magazine for Carriage Builders. Volumes 1871-76. New York.

3. Draft-Book of Centennial Carriages. New York, 1876. 4. Notes and Reports on the Carriages of the International Exhibitions. By G. N. Hooper, Juror and Reporter to the Royal Commissioners, London, 1862; Dublin, 1865; Paris, 1867; Reporter for the Society of Arts, Paris, 1855; London, 1876.

5. Journal of the Society of Arts. Five Lectures on Coach Building. By G. A. Thrupp. London, 1876.

6. Communications from the Municipal Authorities in New York and Paris on the results of Wood Pavement in those Cities. 1873, 1875, and 1876.

7. Reports to the Hon. the Commissioners of Sewers of the City of London. By William Haywood, Engineer and Surveyor to the Commission on-(1) Washing Carriage-way Pavements, 28 May, 1867; (2) Experiments in melting Snow, 10 March, 1871; (3) Granite and Asphalte Pavement, 24 July, 1871; (4) Inflammability of Asphalte Pavement, 16 Jan. 1872; (5) Washing Carriage-ways, 1867 and 1873; (6) Various Asphalte Pavements, 1873; (7) Accidents to Horses on Carriage Pavements, 1873; (8) Asphalte and Wood Pavements, 17 March, 1874.

8. Memorandum on Metropolitan Tramways. By J. B. Redman, M.I.C.E. London, 1870.

9. Down the Road; or Reminiscences of a Gentleman Coachman. By C. T. S. Birch-Reynardson. Second edition, with twelve illustrations in chromolithography from original paintings by H. Alken. Medium 8vo. London, 1875.

10. Annals of the Road; or notes on Mail and Stage Coaching in Great Britain. By Captain Malet, 18th Hussars. London, 1876.

11. Horses and Harness; a sequel to Bits and Bearing-reins. By Edward Fordham Flower. 2nd edition. London, 1876. 12. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Pictures illustrative of the Old Coaching Days. London, 1877.

T is our intention in this paper to treat of carriages that run upon ordinary roads, as distinguished from rolling stock on railways. With carriages we shall also associate the existing roads, whether in city or province, and we shall not overlook the important part that tramways play in our social economy.

We

We shall complete our review with an outline of what the past presented to us in the form of mails and coaches, and what the last few years have given us as a mild renaissance of one of the mainsprings of English life forty years ago.

Any one who has travelled in a Russian tarentasse has learnt how a people emerging from barbarism, with roads ill adapted to Western springs, obtain by the elasticity of wood some comfort for the boyard and enable the Moscow merchant to limit the aching of his bones. The wheels, the axletrees, and linchpins are there; the carriage itself is far from uncomfortable, and it is slung on a couple of strong but pliable poles, which run from the fore to the hind axletree. We say nothing of the discomfort of the driver, of his white teeth, nor of his merry laugh, as the near-wheeler makes a plunge to the off to avoid that well-neglected hole in the bridge you are traversing. How he sits is a marvel, as also is the pace his team often makes! In Norway, again, the traveller gets a little cariole adapted for one person only, which his pony bowls along at some six miles an hour, with no springs to ease the traveller, who in this case is the driver, but with such long shafts that the most luxurious will hardly call out for them. The length of the shaft is the spring,* though, as a matter of fact, the roads north of Christiania are quite good enough for one of the Hastings village-carts in which travellers, particularly loving couples, might have the advantage of trotting along together to exchange views about the scenery, instead of lolling away some hundred yards apart past beautiful waterfalls and through valleys like the Romsdal.

The tarentasse and the cariole are the representative carriages of a semi-civilisation, adapted for what were not roads, but by-paths or open wastes. Like Finland, which long since surpassed Russia in having good macadamised roads, due, we are bound to say, to the propinquity of granite wherewith to make them, Sweden and Norway have given us the routes, and the carriage builder of the country has not kept pace with them. It is long since wood and the length of it was depended on in Western Europe to give us ease in our short or long stages.t

The cariole is easy enough. We once drove one from 3 P.M. to 4 A.M., with a rest of one hour and a half for dinner, and walked twenty miles within the next sixteen hours.

+ Fitz Allan, Earl of Arundel, introduced coaches in 1580, the good Queen Bess having before that ridden behind her chamberlain. Springs came into use in the early part of the last century, and on the 8th August, 1784, the first mail coach ran between Bath and London. In 1837, 141 mails and coaches passed Hyde Park barracks daily, and for the year ending the 5th January, 1837, 6,643,217 miles were run by mail coaches.

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Even the jobmaster from Brussels will risk his springs along those wretched paved ways that lead in divers directions from that city, particularly to Waterloo. Briefly, springs in various forms are universal, and are open to our approval or the reverse, according to their form and the superincumbent weight. Before we notice the vehicles to which they are usually applied, it may be worth while to draw attention to their names and their derivation. It is singular,' says Mr. Bridges Adams, that all our names for carriages are taken from abroad. The coach from the Hungarian kotsee; the chariot, vis-à-vis and chaise from the French; the landau, barouche, britzschka, and droitzschka, from the German; curricle from the Latin; whilst of whiskey, gig, stanhope, tilbury, buggy, dennet, and jaunting car, our only native names, six of them are variations of the same thing.' But how about drag, dog-cart, mail phaeton, and hansom, the happily named 'gondola of London streets,' Mr. Adams?

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Carriage building is so far an art that it is, or should be, an application of science, and not the drivelling of a mere mechanical idiot who presumes to ignore the importance of sound theory; and it would be unjust to say that the true position which coach-building should take, as something more than an industry, has been overlooked by all connected with it. In the discussion which followed the reading of a suggestive paper by Mr. Hooper at the Society of Arts, 5th of December, 1855, one speaker (Mr. James Rock, junior) expressed very neatly what is required. The master coach-builder, if master of his art, required to be a compound of the artist and the engineer.' Yet whilst other countries have their technical schools for workmen, we work on in a rule of thumb fashion, progressive builders finding perverse workmen, and perverse workmen for the most part finding masters content with the unscientific and unartistic method of doing work. To compete with the workmen of foreign nations our own must go through as good a course of education, and, leaving Staffordshire and other districts to supply London and provincial builders with iron, laces, silks, cloths, hides, varnishes, oils, and colours, we must educate the artist to combine these so that we may secure our own, and maintain a large export trade. A very few years ago an organ of coach-builders sounded the note of warning that Paris by more elegant form and delicate finish was having the monopoly of the export of voitures de luxe' to the United States, and the advance since then made by us has not been sufficient to regain lost ground. In reply to that note, a New York journal inti

* A note by Captain Malet (p. 3) throws some doubt on this derivation.

mated

mated that perchance they themselves might enter into competition with us as exporters. We shall see that they have done so. In April last, a meeting on the subject of technical education was held at the Artisans' Institute, Castle Street, when some very plain truths were put forward by Mr. Morley, M.P., and others who attended it. It was said with perfect accuracy, that if our workmen wish to hold their own against those of foreign nations, they must go through a course of superior education; and to no handicraft is the establishment of this technical school more important than to that of which we are writing. That there will be some limit to the subjects with which it deals is unquestionable, for it will otherwise trench on the field of others; but we may fairly expect its professors to settle in an authoritative manner what is the best material and form for spokes, stocks (hubs) and felloes. Of the three woods, elm, gumwood and locust, which is the best for the stocks? or, indeed, is the last admissible, although recognised in the United States? Admitting that hickory is the best for the spokes of light wheels, at what point in the weight of wheels should oak replace it? Is our somewhat flat form scientifically as good as the more rounded turn which the American wheelwright gives his spoke? Should the felloes be formed of two pieces as with them, or four as with us, and should they be of oak, ash, or bois d'arc? How about the addition of steel-plates round and between the spokes, where they enter the hub? Then, again, what wood offers the best materials for pole or shafts, and is there any combination of wood and iron which shall render the breaking of a pole further removed from possibility, or should we follow the Americans, and seek in a combination of hickory and ash the best security for our families who drive out in a hilly country? Is there any value in the American side-bar spring, and of the various patents of it taken out there, which is the best?

At such a school a workman will learn how leather is to be cut to the best advantage, how to detect whether it has been oak-bark or chemically tanned; and its teachers will have to settle whether the grain should run vertically, horizontally or diagonally on the carriage top, all three plans being at present adopted by three separate French and English firms of note. Again, is there any particular quality in the Valentine varnish which, as an American production, is beginning to replace in the States our own renowned varnishes, which up to within a few years had almost a monopoly there, as, indeed they still have elsewhere? Is it more durable? What is its comparative lustre, and what is the proper instrument for testing this? What is the most colourless varnish to lay over white paint? Are the Americans

Americans right in affirming that the day for preparing wood by a series of lead coatings is gone by, and that some other plan should obtain for filling up the pores of the wood and preparing it to take the paint? Above all, a working painter should be able to learn why it is that certain colours will not stand with certain varnishes, and what is the reason, in a chemical sense, for this. Might not such an Institute also settle whether what is termed the French rule' in designing carriages should or should not obtain with us? The Americans seem to think something of it.

If we would hold our own in that enormous trade which the Australian colonies and India ought to give us, we must all, master and workman, have these points at our fingers' ends. As exporters we must recognise that an Australian colonist may want a light strong vehicle to rattle over long distances, and that the American being more likely to have the type than ourselves, we must borrow from him. It was only the other day that the member of a New York firm passed through London on his way to continental cities. He had already visited India, China, Japan and Australia with his patterns for materials which enter into the construction of carriages, such as spokes, hubs, bolts, leathers, &c., so that we have in competition with us not only the New York carriage-builder, but the manufacturer of material to send ready to the colonial constructor at Melbourne and Sydney. And if the orders obtained (of the number of which he did not seem to complain) were executed according to sample, it was certainly not cheap clocks or wooden nutmegs that he had been attempting to supply. Indeed in one case he had been seeking orders for certain buckles, rings, terrets, hames, &c., which would raise the price of any harness where they might be used from 25 to 75 per cent., and this for ornamental as well as strictly useful purposes. And that this word ornamental may not be mistaken for the mere addition of garish and expensive metals, let us add, in all fairness to the American, that the principle of these mountings involved the manufacture of the neatest as well as the most durable harness, for the metallic parts, that we have yet seen-inasmuch as all metal was covered by a durable rubber coating, and neatness and solidity were obtained far beyond anything yet presented in this kingdom of good harness-work.

If, since the Exhibition of 1862, there has been with us some improvement in the colour and design for interior fittings, we can scarcely congratulate our builders on equalling the French in the quality of the work they put into them. In the elegance of

form