I like these specimens, for they don't require much paint, and they never rot. With stone foundations, bedded in the ground below frost, and the posts well drilled and leaded into them, they stand forever - that is, as long as our human forevers are likely to want them.

Ornamental Iron Work #1

Iron ornamental work continually increases in variety and importance, and usurps the place of other materials. It was but yesterday that iron bedsteads were introduced, and now we hare all kinds of chairs, settees, vases, lamps, summer-houses, etc.

Fig. 1 represents a lamp, quite perfect in its form and rivalling the beautiful castings in Berlin. We obtained this pattern and Fig. 2 from Mr. Robert Wood, of Ridge Avenue, Philadelphia, celebrated the Union over for his iron railings and ornamental castings.

Fig. 3 is also made of iron, and when these are bronzed they are beautiful household furnishings.

Fig. 4 represents a stand for flowers, to be placed on a piazza, in a hall of entrance, or drawing-room, and should be either highly painted and varnished, or, what would be preferable, bronzed. The cups catch and retain any water that may leak from the flower-pots.

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

Figs. 5 and 6 are chairs, much used in the open air and for cemetery lots, and the benches, Figs. 7 and 8, are similarly employed.

Fig. 7.

Fig. 8.

Iron is now used in architecture, ships,.and rigging. Wire ropes are employed in many mines. At equal strengths, a wire rope is lighter by one-third than a hemp rope, and by two-thirds than a chain, an important fact. Then we have metallic life-boats, pontoons, and army-wagons; the boats now made, it is said, cannot be broken or overset, let them be used ever so roughly, and the pontoons are models of lightness. We are to have, they say, railroads to California, and the railway to India, by the Euphrates valley, while that from Honduras to the Pacific, 161 miles, seems a fixed fact, so that the demand for iron will be unlimited.

Glass will be the next thing generally introduced, and for new purposes. We have seen a glass mantle-piece, and glass picture and looking-glass frames; there is in Philadelphia a street pavement of glass, cast in octagons, which has been laid down for many years, and is now uninjured; why not glass tables, Ac., as well as crystal palaces. Moulding glass is yet in its infancy.