being 13 inches square and 3 inches thick; the adobes or sun-dried bricks measuring from 6 to 16 inches square, and from 2 to 7 inches thick. The adobes were laid in clay, the work being striped horizontally, every four or five feet in height, with thick layers of reed matting steeped in bitumen to form the bond; the burned bricks were laid while warm in hot bitumen, the bond being formed in the laying. In addition to the above kinds, there were triangular bricks for corners of walls, and wedge-shaped bricks for arches, which were sometimes concave below and convex

on top.

Recent excavations have been made on the site of the Pithon, the treasure-city built by King Rameses II. with the bondage labor of the children of Israel. The buildings prove to have consisted almost entirely of tremendous storehouses, built of adobes; some of these sun-dried bricks were made with straw for binding, and some without it. Explorations are soon to be commenced on the site of the ancient city of Tanis, the capital of the Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, one of whom, it is supposed, was the

ruled Egypt when Joseph was carried there.

Pharaoh who

Some of the mysteries surrounding that period it is hoped will be solved, and very interesting developments are looked for when these researches are begun.

It is thought that the business of brick-making was a royal monopoly in Egypt, as a very large number of bricks are found in that country with the stamp of Thothmes III., who is believed to be the prince who reigned at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews.

The bricks of this prince are impressed with his cartouche,

which is an oval, on which the hieroglyphic characters used for his name were stamped, and the adobes made by him. were 12 inches long, 9 inches wide, 63 inches thick, and one in the British Museum weighed 37 pounds and 10 ounces.

Colored bricks, as a means of external decoration, were extensively and very effectively used in the highly ornamental architecture of Italy and Germany during the Middle Ages. The works of Ruskin, Street, and others, have revived the taste for ornamental and polychrome brick-work, which promises to revolutionize the ecclesiastical and domestic architecture of Europe and America, and the taste for this class of brickwork has been gradually developing, and has resulted in the great advance that has been made in the manufacture of colored, relief, moulded, and intaglio bricks during the past few years, until it now bids fair to rival the standard of earlier ages. In sympathy with the demand for a higher grade of ornamental bricks, there is a more exacting standard as to the quality of the common building bricks used, and architects and engineers now generally require that all bricks shall be sound and thoroughly burned. When this is so, they are of a clear and uniform color, and when struck together they will ring with a sharp metallic sound; inferiority is plainly manifest when there is a deficiency in either of these points.

The great perfection to which the ancients carried the art of brick-making is probably due to the abundance of labor; plenty of time to devote to each stage of the work, their great patience and painstaking, and the natural drying and preserving climate of the east. The dry, warm atmosphere

of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia, which countries were the nurseries of the ceramic arts, has kept in a good state of preservation for more than 3000 years the sun-dried bricks so common in those countries; many well-preserved adobes are also found in towns and walls of ancient India.

Bricks burned and unburned were employed in the construction of the Great Wall of China, which was the most remarkable fortification ever erected by human hands; millions of men were employed for the space of ten years in its construction, and it was completed in 211 B. C. The length was about 1250 miles, the height averaging about 22 feet; each face of the wall was built of hewn stone or brick, and filled in between with earth; it was wider at the bottom than at the top, which was sufficient for six horsemen to ride abreast, and it was built by the great emperor of China, Shee-Hoang-Ti, who is its national hero.

It is probable that burned clay did not find great favor with the ancient Greeks, as they possessed an abundance of stone, and their early and beautiful temples were built of that material.

The walls of Athens, on the side toward Mount Hymettus, were built of bricks, and this is probably the largest undertaking in which they were employed by the Greeks.

The use of bricks for architectural construction was never, at any period, extensive in Greece; but in some few cases they were employed in minor public edifices.

Their first application has been attributed to Hyperbius, of Crete, and Euryalus or Agrolas. The bricks were made with a mould, and were named after the number of palms-length.

In the first century of the Christian era while the bricks. made by the Romans were of a superior quality, those made by the Greeks were very inferior.

But little is known of the material used in the early buildings of the Latin cities; yet judging from the great extent and destructiveness of the fires in Rome, it is inferred that wood entered largely into the construction of buildings to the time of Nero. During his reign in A. D. 64, twothirds of the city was destroyed by fire. Augustus, who devoted so much time and thought to the beautification of Rome, had restricted the height of buildings to seventy feet; but this height was still further curtailed by Nero after the great conflagration, and in the rebuilding, a certain part of the houses were constructed of a fire-proof stone from Gabii and Alba.

With the conquest of Carthage, Greece, and Egypt, the Romans became acquainted with the arts of those subjugated countries, and tried to improve upon and use them for the embellishment of the imperial city, and it was most likely their innate desire for improvement that led to the burning of bricks in kilns.

Although burned bricks were used in the Tower of Babel, and, to face the adobes used in the building of the walls and palaces of Babylon, it is probable that the credit of first burning bricks in kilns belongs to the Romans; but it is hard to fix the time when this improvement took place.

Layers of thin bricks, separating the tufa surface into panels, called opus reticulatum, were used in the time of

Augustus. In the time of Nero the walls were faced entirely with excellent brick-work called opus lateritium.

Pliny says that the bricks made in Greece at this time were very inferior, and not fit to be used in the construction of a Roman dwelling, and that no party wall was allowed to be more than eighteen inches in thickness, and that the material would not support one story.

The bricks must have been of a very poor quality, or else Pliny greatly misjudged their strength, for at the present time many buildings are being constructed, four and five stories in height, with the party walls for most of the way only nine inches in thickness, of the poorest kind of salmon bricks of which the water has barely been driven out of the clay by the action of heat; and if Pliny could see some of the bricks now used, he would quake for the safety of the occupants of some modern hotels, apartment houses, office buildings and dwellings that have recently been erected for speculative purposes in London, and some portions of this country.

In the first century of the Christian era, the bricks were better than at any other period; they were large, flat, and thin, generally two feet square, and one inch thick, and were what we call Roman tiles, but were used for building walls, and not merely for roofing or pavements; the facing bricks were triangular, the broad side being outwards. But bricks gradually became thicker and shorter, until in the fourth century they were very often as many as four to a foot on the face of the wall; which is about the same as in modern structures.