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But again, suppose the common gelatine, instead of surrounding a stem, or axis, should form for itself an investing tube, in which, as in a sheath to lodge, with apertures, through which the polypes can protrude themselves, and expand their tentacles for food; we have here a compound tubular zoophyte.

Great is the variety of form which these tubular zoophytes present: some

Cydonium.

assume the appearance of little trees, cyonium, Cydonium, etc.) In these a

tough, sub-cartilaginous body, often with calcareous spicula interspersed through it, and containing numerous canals, is studded with polypes, like hydras. These are all seated in little cells on the surface, from which they can protrude and expand their tentacles.

Cuvier regards the Pennatulæ, or sea

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Pennatula.

pens, as forming a distinct section, and terms them swimming, or detached polypes.

The Pennatule have, however, a calcareous axis, though not fixed. They

are termed sea-pens, from their resemblance to a quill feather, a double set of branches, on the same place, occupying both sides of a shaft. Each branch is furnished with a row of polypes, resembling the barbules along the filaments, or barbs, composing the vane of a quill.

It has been considered by many, that the pennatulæ are capable of rowing themselves along; but this does not appear to be the case. Numbers are found floating on the ocean, carried along with the stream. Many are phosphorescent.

The Actinia, or sea anemonies, certainly form a distinct section. Most of these are single, as the common actinia of our rocky shores, each polype being one animal. But in the genus Zoanthus, numbers rise from a creeping root-like base, attached to the surface of the rock.

The organization of the actiniæ, or fleshy polypes, advances far higher in the scale than does that of the other groups.-M.

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BRICK MAKING.-No. I.

Zoanthus.

We are indebted to a volume lately published, containing a series of papers by Dr. Aikin, for the following interesting statements.

The manufacture of bricks goes up to the very earliest time of historical record. In the book of Genesis, Nimrod is stated to have been the first sovereign, and to have reigned in the land of Shinar, one of the towns of which was Babel. The first building after the flood, of which any mention is made, was the Tower of Babel. It is expressly stated that well

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burned brick was used instead of stone in these constructions; and that slime, which is generally understood to be bitumen, was employed instead of mortar. siderable progress appears to have been made in building both the city and the tower before what is called the confusion of tongues took place, in consequence of which the work was abandoned. Nearly on the same site was afterwards founded the celebrated city of Babel, or Babylon; which is described by Herodotus, the oldest Greek historian, as surrounded by a deep and wide trench, the earth from which

was formed into bricks. These bricks were then burned in furnaces or kilns, and were employed part in lining the trench, and the remainder in building the walls; the cement used was hot bitumen, and between every thirty courses of bricks was a layer of mats, composed of reeds. The ruins of Babylon are still visible, in the form of hillocks, or high mounds, and have been visited of late years, and described by several travellers. The late Mr. Rich appears to have examined these remains with great care; and from his memoir, the following particulars, as far as relates to our immediate subject, are derived. Most of the mounds appear to have a certain degree of connexion with one another; but the largest of the mounds, the Birs Nemrood, together with another adjacent, called Akerkouf, is so far distant from the others as to render it doubtful if it could have been included within the extent of the Babylon described by Herodotus.

of the wall. At the top of the mound is a solid pile, thirty-seven feet high, of burned bricks, with inscriptions, and set in lime mortar.

From the proportions of the three stories that now remain, it seems probable that the mound or pyramid consisted, or perhaps was intended to consist, of five stories; the three lower of which were solid, and the two upper would probably have contained chambers. Whether this pile is the unfinished tower of Babel or not, is at present only matter of conjecture: its local situation with regard to the other mounds is rather in favour of

the hypothesis; and the specimens of bricks now exhibited, which were obtained from this very mound, will be regarded with no small interest; they form part of the collection of the East India Company.

The manufacture of bricks was also known to the ancient Egyptians. Every body is aware that one of the modes of The connected mounds present walls oppression practised by this people toand passages, or galleries, formed of well-wards the Israelites, was the unreasonburned brick, laid in lime mortar of extreme toughness; but in one of them, called the tower of Belus, large solid masses, or fillings up between the wall, are observed of unburned bricks. These latter are more rudely shaped than the burned bricks, being rather clods of earth, composed of a kind of clay mortar, intermixed with chopped straw to prevent it from falling to pieces: these unburned bricks are laid in very thick cement of clay, with layers of reeds above the courses of brick.

able requisition from them of a certain number of bricks: it is not mentioned that these bricks were burned; indeed, the circumstance of their being mixed with chopped straw, like the unbaked bricks found in Babylon, renders it probable that they were only sun-dried. Herodotus also records of Asychis, one of the kings of Egypt, that he built a pyramid of bricks made of the mud or silt dredged up from the bottom of the river. This is perhaps. the same as that called by Pococke the pyramid of MenshehThe Birs Nemrood is at presenta mound dushour, and by Norden the pyramid of seven hundred and sixty-two yards in cir- Meidun: it was visited by both these cumference, and one hundred and ninety- travellers, and is described by them as eight feet high; it consists of three steps, consisting of five degrees, each fifty feet or receding stories: the interior of the high, and the base one hundred and mass appears to consist of layers of un- fifty-seven by two hundred and ten feet; burned bricks set in clay, sometimes with- it is formed of unburned bricks, comout layers of reeds, sometimes with them, posed of a mixture of clay and chopped laid between every five or six courses of straw. Such unburned bricks, Pococke bricks. This mass is in some parts faced adds, are still used in Egypt. It is pro(and probably when perfect was com- bable, that in the time of Pliny the elder, pletely so) with layers of burned bricks set who lived in the reign of Vespasian, in bitumen. These bricks are about thir-unburned brick's were in use elsewhere on teen inches square by three inches thick, and have indented inscriptions, apparently made by a stamp, in a character at present wholly unknown, the elements of which appear to have been representations of arrows or broad-headed nails, variously combined together. The bricks are laid with the written face downward, so that they were not visible on the front

the north coast of Africa; for that author mentions, that at Utica no bricks were allowed to be used that had not been dried five years in the sun; a regulation which apparently would be absurd if applied to baked ones. But sun-dried bricks may rather be considered as a kind of artificial stone than earthenware; and, from the circumstance of chopped

straw being mixed with them, the clay was probably much more sandy and less tenacious, than that required for burned bricks, and approached nearly to the loam employed at present in building walls by ramming, or en pisé; a mode of construction which also was well known to the ancients, Hannibal having constructed several towers on the coast of Spain of this material.

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are made in India by tempering clay, then spreading it on a mat, and making it of an uniform thickness, and when it is half dry, dividing it into bricks: these bricks are then baked in clamps. But it has sometimes happened, in consequence of those hostile incursions by which India has been so often desolated, that when a district has been laid waste, and not re-occupied for several years, clamps of bricks, ready for burning, have been abandoned. On the return of the inhabitants, such clamps have been found so much injured by the rains, and other causes, as not to be worth the expense of burning. Some of these mounds still remain near Benares, and have been cited by careless travellers as ruins of buildings of unburned brick, a material for construction which appears never to have been say-employed in India.

Certain other celebrated buildings of high antiquity were also formed of brick: such were the palaces of Croesus at Sardis, of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, and of Attalus at Tralles; all of which were still remaining in the reign of Trajan. That part of the walls of Athens which looks towards Mount Hymettus, as well as some of the more ancient temples in that city, were also built of brick.

In ancient Rome, if the recorded ing of Augustus, that he found the city of brick, and left it of marble, be of any authority, the public buildings must have been generally of baked brick; but this material does not seem to have been much employed in the construction of private houses, many of which were wattled, or of wicker work, covered with clay, raised on low walls of unbaked bricks. Whatever works were erected by the Romans, of flints, or of other rough unsquared stones, they were in the habit of interposing occasional courses of flat thin bricks, to strengthen the building, and to keep it upright. Many such examples are to be found in our own country, where permanent Roman stations occur. The walls of Richborough, near Sandwich, the tower supposed to have been a lighthouse on the summit of Dover_castle, the station of Garrienum, (now Borough camp,) at the conflux of the Yare and Waveney, in Norfolk, and the walls at Lympne, near Hythe, are among the most perfect and remarkable. All the Roman bricks, that I have seen, are of a deep red colour, very compact, and well burned. They probably were composed of natural clay, not containing lime, and merely sifted, either dry or by washing over, in order to separate the stones and coarser sand.

In Bengal, and generally in the wide alluvial valley of the Ganges, bricks are the usual material for buildings of any solidity; and they appear to have been used in this country from very high antiquity, and to have been employed even in the ornamental parts of architecture.

Dr. Wilkins informs me, that bricks

In Nipal, a hilly country north of Bengal, bricks are made of remarkable compactness of texture: they are of a brownish-red colour, and are very micaceous; so that the clay of which they are formed, has probably originated from the decomposition of granite. Some of these, from the East India Company's museum, are now before the Society. Not only the texture of these bricks, but the elegance of their ornamented surface, deserve notice; the sharpness and depth of cutting are such as to make it probable that they were moulded plain, and that the ornaments were afterwards cut, before the process of burning.

In China, bricks are made of blue clay, more or less sandy: the specimens before the Society have evidently not been burned; they nevertheless do not disturb the clearness of water after lying in it for many hours. When burned they become of rather a pale red, with a compact, almost semi-porcelanous texture.

I am not sufficiently acquainted with the history of the art of brick making, to state to you the date and particulars of its introduction into the different countries of modern continental Europe. It was certainly practised largely in Italy in the beginning of the fourteenth century; and Mr. Hope informs me, that the brick buildings erected at this period in Tuscany, and other parts of the north of Italy, exhibit, at the present day, the finest specimens extant of brickwork. In Holland and the Netherlands, from the scarcity of stone, brick was used at an early period, and to a great extent, to supply the wants of a dense and rich population.

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THE KASR.

The Kasr.

On the north of Hillah, a town situated on the Euphrates, the first ruin that meets the eye of the traveller, is a mound called Jumjuma, an epithet which, like Golgotha and Calvary, signifies, "the place of a skull." South of this is the Amram hill, which is 1100 yards in length, and 800 in breadth, and the figure of which nearly resembles that of a quadrant. The elevation of this mound is somewhat irregular, but at intervals it rises to seventy feet above the level of the plain. It is broken by deep ravines and long winding furrows, and the whole appears one vast elevated mass of earth mixed with fragments of brick, pottery, vitrifications, mortar, and bitumen. At the foot of the narrowest and most elevated part of the embankment, a number of urns are cemented into the burned brick of the wall, which are filled with ashes, intermingled with small fragments of human bones.

A little to the north of the Amram hill, is the Kasr, or Palace, an august ruin, rising full seventy feet above the general level. The whole of this mass is furrowed into deep ravines, intersecting each other in every direction, and as the traveller passes over it, his feet sink into dust and rubbish. Every vestige discovered in it shows it to have been composed of buildings superior to all the rest in this section of the ruins, but the excavations which

are constantly going forward there to obtain bricks, make it difficult to decipher the original designs of the mound. In some places, the workmen have bored into the solid mass, discovering on every hand walls of burned bricks laid in lime mortar fragments of alabaster vessels, fine earth, enware, marble, and varnished tiles. Richdiscovered a colossal lion, standing on a pedestal of coarse granite of a grey colour, and of rude workmanship. This was on the north side of the mound; and immediately west of it are the ruins peculiarly denominated the Kasr, or Palace.

There is one remarkable difference between the material of the Kasr, and that of the Mujelibe and the Birs Nemroud. (See Visitor, 1841, pages 297 and 401.) The latter piles are vast internal courses of sun-dried bricks, consolidated by the intervention of reeds and slime; but the Kasr is formed of furnace-burned brick, with its necessary cements. Every brick has been found, on examination, to be placed with its face downwards; and where bitumen has been used, the bricks of each course were covered with a layer of bitumen, spread over with reeds, or laid in regular matting; and on this preparation the faces of the succeeding courses were imbedded. This agrees with the account of Herodotus, who states that the bricks for the walls were made of the clay dug from the moat that surrounded them;

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