religious purposes. Later two-wheeled horse-chariots were invented, and were used from India to Britain and North Africa. He adduces the authority of old Johann Scheffer, who published a book entitled De re vehiculari, in 1671, for the opinion that, contrary to what one would expect, the four-wheeled ox-waggon was the first vehicle, then the taming of horses led to the two-wheeled chariots or carts, and finally the horses were ridden. The earliest history of the cart will perhaps always remain in obscurity; it is indeed probable that it arose independently in more than one area. The ancestral slide-car may have been one source, and it is by no means unlikely that a framework on rollers, which was used for moving large masses of stone, or even the common sledge, may also have given rise to a four-wheeled waggon. We must now return from this long digression to a consideration of certain wheeled vehicles that are still in use, or, till recently, were employed in the British Islands. The wheels, however, are of small diameter, and are solid instead of having spokes. In Capt. Burt's famous Letters,* we find illustrations of two kinds of block-wheel cart that were in use in Inverness about 1730. Both of them are simple modifications of the slide-car, which, as we have * BURT, Letters from a Gentieman in the North of Scotland to his FRIEND in London, 1754. already seen, was in contemporary use with them, with the addition of wheels. Concerning the latter we read: "THE Wheels, when new, are about a Foot and half high, but are soon worn very small: They are made of three pieces of Plank, pinned together at the Edges like the Head of a Butter Firkin, and the Axeltree goes round with the Wheel, which having some Part of the Circumference with the Grain, and other Parts not, it wears unequally, and in a little Time is rather angular than round, which causes a disagreeable Noise, as it moves upon the Stones." One of these carts appears to be nothing more than a wheeled slide-car, if the term be allowed, in which a round wicker basket is jammed between the shafts just behind the pony. The other consists of an open framework, the base of which is formed by the two shafts; and, as a consequence, the basket-like body of the cart is tilted up at the same angle as the latter. This is "that species wherein they carry their Peats."* A very similar cart to the last is engraved on the map illustrating Twiss's A Tour in Ireland in 1775; but in this there is no front to the cart, and the side rails decrease in size from behind forwards, and cease by the flanks of the horse, so that when the *These are called kellachies; for another account of these and other primitive carts, see G. L. GOMME, The Village Community (1890), pp. 278, 286. ISAAC TAYLOR, The Origin of the Aryans (1890), p. 179, may also be consulted. cart is being drawn the tops of the rails are approximately horizontal. An illustration (Fig. 25) of the same cart is given by Croker.* In an engraving by James Malton, published in 1791, of the College Green, Dublin,† we find an illustration of a cart which consists of two shafts which Two block-wheel carts, Inverness (1754); after Burt. rest on pivots jutting out from the centre of two solid wooden wheels, which are connected together by a thick quadrangular axle-tree. In this cart the wheels and the axle are solidly joined together, and revolve *T. CROFTON CROKER, Researches in the South of Ireland, 1824. + MALTON and COWEN, A Picturesque and Descriptive View of the City of Dublin in 1791. as one piece. The only difference between the wheels of this cart and those of our second "missing-link," as it may be termed, is that in the latter they are made out of a single tree-trunk, as in the Portuguese cart, whereas in the former they are built up of several pieces of wood. Owing to the small size of the wheels the shafts are inclined at a great angle, and in order to get it level, the platform of the cart has to be propped up behind by a couple of stakes; or, to put it in other words, boards are laid across the side-rails of such a cart as that figured in the Tour in Ireland. There are contemporary engravings of other carts published towards the end of last century, which represent very similar carts-in counties Dublin and Wicklow for example-but in which the wheels are outside of the shafts; as no linch-pin is drawn we must assume that in these too the axle revolved along with the wheels. These carts are described in the following manner by Twiss in his anonymously published book, A Tour in Ireland in 1775 "Goods are conveyed about the city on small two-wheeled cars, drawn by a single horse; the wheels are thin round blocks, each about twenty inches in diameter. The wheels of those cars which are used in the country are placed at a greater distance from each other than those of city cars." Quite similar cars may still be seen in use in the north of Ireland, from County Donegal to County |