Earthen vessel, imitation of shell,
Missouri.
From W. H. Holmes’ “Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans.”
Electric lamps in candle shapes.
Modern manufacture in its designs gives us a kindred persistence of old forms in new things. For electric illumination we have bulbs which recall the shape of a candle-blaze, or surmount an old-fashioned candlestick; a gas-burner, popular for fifty years, repeats in milky porcelain the whole length of a candle. Gas-grates, in uncounted thousands throughout our cities every winter, offer us flames which flicker and leap over asbestos and clay molded into the semblance of maple or charcoal. Nor is the engineer himself, for all his sternness of discipline, quite free from prolonging the reign of the past, even at unwarrantable cost. When steel was first used for steam boilers there was a period of hesitation during which the metal was used unduly thick, as if to maintain the long familiar massiveness of iron structures. When automobiles were invented, they at first closely resembled common carriages. To-day, designers have departed from tradition, and provide us with horseless vehicles which respond to their new needs in ways wholly untrammeled by inherited ideas. In an automobile, driven by steam or gasoline, there must be due disposition of fuel, of machinery, of cooling apparatus, all so combined as to bring the center of gravity as low as may be best, affording ready access to any part needing lubrication, repair, or renewal; throughout there must be the minimum of dead weight, of friction, and of liability to derangement; all with means of easy, quick, and certain control. Why should these requirements be deferred to repeating the model of a carriage drawn by a horse? In Europe, to this hour, the railroad carriages are an imitation of the old road-coaches, horse carriages slightly modified. America, fortunately, from the first has had cars directly adapted to railroad exigencies, with a thoroughfare extending the whole length of a train, avoiding the box-like compartments which may give the lunatic or the murderer an opportunity to work his will.
Notre Dame de Bonsecours, Montreal. Before restoration.
NEW AMSTERDAM THEATRE, NEW YORK.
No pillars obstruct a full view of the stage.
Sometimes an inherited form taken to a new home proves to be faulty there, and is discarded. When Normandy sent forth its children to Canada, they built on the shores of the St. Lawrence just such high-pitched roofs as had sheltered them in Caen and Rouen. An example remains at Montreal in the roof of Notre Dame de Bonsecours. But in Montreal and Quebec the snowfall is much heavier than in Northern France, and the Norman roofs at intervals from December to March were wont to let loose their avalanches with an effect at times deadly. To-day, therefore, in French Canada many of the roofs, especially in towns and cities, are flat or nearly flat, while the best models quite reverse the old design. In breadths somewhat concave they catch the snow as in a basin, and allow it to melt slowly so as to run down a pipe through the center of the building.