Boches

“ The arch is well known to be the strongest form of support, and the arches of the feet are consequently adapted to be the best supports for the weight of the body. An arch has level abutments and a centre or keystone, which is represented in the foot by that bone with which the bones of the leg articulate. Now if the abutments of an arch are not level the position of the keystone is altered and the arch at once becomes unstable. ”

“ A scantling of wood placed on its edge will support a much greater weight than one placed on its side; so, in laying a floor, instead of laying all the boards on their sides, which would not be strong enough, or placing them all on their edges, which would use too much wood, the plan is to place on edge a sufficient number, and on these to lay the floor of boards on their sides. ”

“ The apparently solid logs of which the rest of the house is built are now mere cylinders of bark, and through the thickest of them you could push your little finger. Furniture, tables, chairs, chests of drawers, everything made of wood is inevitably attacked, and in a single night a strong trunk is often riddled through and through, and turned into match-wood. ”

“ To this rock, high like a tower, a man was formerly chained, whose bones are yet preserved in the chains. Both bones and chains are in a high state of preservation. The bones of the arms are from seven to eight cubits in length, of an astonishing thickness. The skull is like the cupola of a bath, and a man may creep in and out without pain through the eye-holes. ”

“ Now shape a bag or pocket of size sufficient to hold about a hundred-weight of stone, and by puncturing the edges with a knife, marline-spike, or other pointed tool, sew together; make a handle of twisted or pleated hide, and having filled your bucket with dry sand or earth let it stand till the whole is quite dry, when it will be properly distended and will maintain its shape until worn out. ”

“ To secure heavy objects in a mixed box, an inverted rough stool is the best, the cross piece on the object below, and the sides coming up to the lid. If cross bars are nailed in a box, damage may be done to an object in forcing the bars loose. ”

“ From boxes of uneven size, men and animals may be made. Round boxes or small oblong boxes form heads. Larger boxes make bodies. Legs and arms are boxes of equal size.
The faces are drawn with pencil upon the back of boxes where there is no print. A wire hair-pin will keep the arms in place. It will need to be pressed through the box sides and bent so that the arm boxes may be slipped upon it. Men of all sorts may be made. ”

“ The several pieces of wood were not only of different shapes and sizes, but they were as thin as the thinnest veneer; yet the box had been formed by simply joining them together. The man who made that box must have been possessed of ingenuity worthy of a better cause.
I perceived how the puzzle had been worked. ”

“ They formed a long square; the long side facing the sea. The dimensions of the whole were about twenty-four feet by sixteen. I cut deep mortices in the trees, about ten feet distant from the ground, and again ten feet higher, to form a second story; I then placed in them strong poles: this was the skeleton of my house—solid, if not elegant; I placed over this a rude roof of bark, cut in squares, and placed sloping, that the rain might run off. We fastened these with the thorn of the acacia, as our nails were too precious to be lavished. While procuring the bark, we made many discoveries. ”

“ She wheeled about and pointed at the other side of the alcove, where stood the metal box, sullen, defiant, secure.
“By Jove, that's so, tool Why, I'd all but forgotten that! You're a brick, Beta! The box, by all means. Perhaps the most important things of all are still in safety there. ”

“ Build an inverted Harvey-steel box about eight feet high, one hundred and fifty feet long, half as wide, with walls of eighteen-inch thickness, and a roof of three, and you have strong protection against shot and shell. ”

“ Of box are made wheels, sheaves, pins, pegs for musical instruments, nut-crackers, button-moulds, weavers’ shuttles, hollar-sticks, bump-sticks, and dressers for the shoe{64}maker, rulers, rolling-pins, pestles, mall-balls, beetles, tops, chessmen, tables, screws, bobbins for bone-lace, spoons, knife-handles, but especially combs.” Most of those engravings in books, called wood-cuts, are done upon Box wood, and for that purpose English Box is superior to any other, though a great portion of what is used in this country comes from the Levant. ”

“ The cubit is a cubit and an hand breadth; even the bottom shall be a cubit, and the breadth a cubit, and the border of it by its edge on every side shall be a span: and this shall be the higher place of the altar. [372] [373] 14 And from the bottom upon the ground even to the lower ledge shall be two cubits, and the breadth one cubit; and from the smaller ledge even to the greater ledge shall be four cubits, and the breadth one cubit. 15 So the altar shall be four cubits; and from the altar and upward shall be four horns. ”

“ We also make an end squeeze that no one can tell from a square box, as the end of box is immovable, the metal of the end being thinner than rest of box, being able to spring or give as it is pressed, and doing the work. ”

“ Then the priest said to Na-nefer-ka-ptah, 'This book is in the middle of the river at Koptos, in an iron box; in the iron box is a bronze box; in the bronze box is a sycamore box; in the sycamore box is an ivory and ebony box; in the ivory and ebony box is a silver box; in the silver box is a golden box, and in that is the book. ”

“ The Liber or Fibrous Bark, the Inner Bark. This contains some wood-cells, or their equivalent, commonly in the form of bast or bast-cells (411, Fig. 444) , such as those of Basswood or Linden, and among herbs those of flax and hemp, which are spun and woven or made into cordage. It also contains cells which are named sieve-cells, on account of numerous slits and pores in their walls, by which the protoplasm of contiguous cells communicates. In woody stems, whenever a new layer of wood is formed, some new liber or inner bark is also formed outside of it. ”

“ The Sphere would willingly have continued his lessons by indoctrinating me in the conformation of all regular Solids. Cylinders, Cones, Pyramids, Pentahedrons, Hexahedrons, Dodecahedrons, and Spheres: but I ventured to interrupt him. Not that I was wearied of knowledge. On the contrary, I thirsted for yet deeper and fuller draughts than he was offering to me.
“Pardon me,” said I, “O Thou Whom I must no longer address as the Perfection of all Beauty; but let me beg thee to vouchsafe thy servant a sight of thine interior.”
Sphere. My what?
I. Thine interior: thy stomach, thy intestines. ”

“ To the box is attached a strong piece of iron, kept pressed upon it by a spring at one extremity; so that as the top of the box rises, the motion is made sensible at the point held by the spring, and when the top descends the spring draws the piece of iron into close contact with it. ”

“ Now this very contradiction should have taught Mr. Buckle that he was involved in a fallacy. In nature totals are made up of parts similar to the whole. A block of stone is made up of stony molecules ; a kidney of several little kidneys ; a wave is an accumulation of little waves. Every chip of wood has the same construction as the block. ”

“ Where wood is burned, no better wood-box can be found than an old carved chest, either one of the Italian cassoni, with their painted panels and gilded volutes, or a plain box of oak or walnut with well-designed panels and old iron hasps. The best substitute for such a chest is a plain wicker basket, without ornamentation, enamel paint or gilding. ”

“ Perhaps, by way of illustration, we may employ an analogy. A number of bricks can be placed on one another to form a cube; a number of cannon balls will form a pyramidical pile. The aggregate of bricks resembles in shape the separate bricks; the aggregate of balls does not resemble a ball in shape. ”

“ In the middle of the box is a partition, extending nearly the whole length of the box, and on the inside, on each side, is a ledge or piece of moulding to support slates to be laid over the entire surface of the box. ”

“ The inner bark, or liber, is of a close fibrous texture, like that of the Morus papyrifera, and when separated from the other bark, and cleansed from the adhering particles, resembles a coarse piece of linen. It has been worked into ropes, which are very strong, and the poorer class of people employ the inner bark of younger trees, which is more easily prepared, for the purpose of making a coarse stuff, which they wear when working in the fields. ”

“ No box of bricks that can at present be bought for money will build anything that can satisfy an imaginative child. An ordinary box of bricks—a really handsome one—measures, say, 12 by 8 by 2 in. If anything admirable is to be built from this amount of material the material ought to be presented in very small cubes, oblongs and arches—say 1 in. ”

“ A box has been made of proper dimensions, free within from all outside disturbance or motion of air. In this box is placed a steel frame, which moves like a gate on a very delicate hinge, so as to avoid all possible friction. ”

“ Foremost in this movement are the enlightened and enterprising inventors of Bell’s Encyclopædic Tomb Blocks which in point of density of texture and specific gravity compare favourably with any other materials, whether of metal, brick, or stone. Once placed in position they cannot be removed even by the wildest of hydraulic rams or the most ferocious of cranes. ”

“ It is often best to put heavy and light things in the same box, to equalize weights in journeying; if well secured, a mixed boxful travels well. Be very careful that a wedge–shaped stone cannot force itself loose by repeated jolts, or it may split a box. ”

“ When, on the other hand, the materials of which a single bed, or any set of beds, is composed are of very fine grain, those materials are generally equally diffused over a very wide area, changes in thickness are rare and occur very gradually, and the bed or set of beds where it comes to an end does so very gradually, and sometimes almost insensibly. ”

“ The bones are spread in a large room, where you can work at your leisure, undisturbed by any mortal, from morning till night, taking your breakfast and dinner with us. It is a precious collection, consisting of upwards of three hundred bones, few of them of the large kinds which are already possessed. ”

“ In minute structure each scale consists of an outer layer of bone, which, like the bone of the endoskeleton, may either be homogeneous except for a feeble lamination, or it may contain bone-cells arranged in successive layers, parallel to the surface of the scale. ”

“ This is simply a square box carved in very high relief, after the pattern of a Roman tomb. The ornaments may be appliqué. These sarcophagi are very beautiful when ivoried.
Books. A very pretty pattern for a box is an old book of the twelfth or thirteenth century, with its clasps and other ornaments in high relief. One of the covers is set on hinges, and forms the lid. Care should be taken to polish and ornament the whole so as to look like an original. It was very common to make the sides of old books of wooden panels, which were carved in high relief. ”

“ The earth is best left in the carrying basket, which is laid in the roped basket at the bottom, and taken out of it at the surface. If the pit is rotten and wide at the top, the basket has to be swung across the top two or three times, until on letting the ropes loose it flies out 10 or 20 feet to the side of the pit, where it is caught by the emptying boy. ”

“ The block should be held flat upon the surface when sanding near an arris, otherwise the arris will be rounded. The arrises should be kept sharp unless on a table leg, arm of a chair or something similar, in which the sharp arrises would be likely to injure the hand or become splintered through usage. ”

“ In most cases the surface of the slab is so weathered and carious, that the most careful rubbing with heel-ball or black-lead presents but an indistinct representation, for by these means every accidental cavity appears on the paper as clearly as the lines, and confusion is the result. ”

“ If our block of wood be drilled, and lead poured in the hole, the total size of wood-and-lead block being kept constantly at one cubic foot, the block will sink as soon as its whole weight exceeds sixty-two pounds. ”

“ Fig. 6 represents its body, from which the fingers are removed, showing the pectoral plates, Q, and capital plates, R, which form an integument over the abdominal cavity of the body, and terminate in a mouth (X,) capable of being protruded into an elongated proboscis by the contraction of its plated integument. ”

“ Each end of every block is worked with a slightly raised and well-smoothed border, for the purpose of securing without unnecessary labor a perfectly accurate joint. The shallow holes, III, III, in the upper surfaces are pry-holes, which were of use in prying the blocks into position. ”

“ The smaller folds, or such as may be seen in hand specimens and even in considerable blocks of stone, are commonly called contortions, and it is interesting to observe that they are, in nearly everything except size, precisely like the large folds, so that they answer admirably as geological models. ”

“ On the tops of the barest hills and buried in the deepest bogs are to be found the roots, stems and other remains of these ancient woods, mostly of oak and pine, some of the bogs being literally full of stems, the splinters of which burn like matches. ”

“ Baskets are of all sizes, from the little beauties no bigger than a teacup, woven finely and adorned with beads and bits of dyed feathers, to the granaries, or the storage baskets, holding half a ton, nine feet and nine inches in circumference, three feet deep. ”