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Ireland, from County Donegal to County Down. The wheels may be within the shafts and with a revolving axle; now, however, the latter is usually quite slender; or the wheels may be outside the shafts and with a linch-pin, showing that the axle is fixed and that the wheels alone revolve. Planks may be movably attached to the edges of the platform, or the sides may be permanently fastened, and so a cart, as opposed to what is more correctly termed a float or a lorry, is evolved.

The North Irish peasant farmer, when he wishes to crush the clods of earth on his dry fields, will lift the cart with its shafts off the wheels, and replace them on a wooden roller, resembling the sketch on page 135, and to increase its effectiveness he puts stones into the cart. The cart, save for its platform, thus reverts to the stage of the first "missing link."

"In Borrowdale it is on record that wheeled vehicles did not make their appearance till about 1770; and when these novelties did reach the lakes, they were clumsy and awkward in character. Clog-wheels were the first type used on farm carts, and there are . still old men of between eighty and ninety years, who can remember them in use. The wheels are clumsy discs of wood, joined by a great beam or axle, which is firmly fastened to them. The wheels are 1 ft. 10 ins. in diameter, and 3 ins. wide in the tyre, where the iron bands or 'strakes' are formed by three pieces nailed to the wood. The distance between the wheels is 3 ft. 2 ins."

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But the cart is, so to speak, only half fledged; it moves along slowly and heavily on its small, solid wheels.

The evolution of the spoke-wheel was probably a slow affair, and its stages are missing from Ireland, so we must turn elsewhere for evidence.

H. Swainson Cowper, "Some Old-Fashioned Contrivances in Lakeland," The Reliquary and Illustrated Archeologist, iv., 1898, p. 20.

The employment of spoke-wheels is, however, of great antiquity. Messrs. Perrot and Chipiez note that:

"Not one of the Assyrian military pictures can be named in which war chariots do not appear, and they are by no means the heavy and clumsy cars now used in some parts both of European and Asiatic Turkey. Their wheels are far from being those solid discs of timber that are alone capable of resisting the inequalities of a roadless country. They have not the lightness of a modern carriage, with its tires of beaten steel, but the felloes of their wheels are light and graceful enough to prove that the roads of those times were better than anything the Mesopotamia of today can show. The spokes, which seem to have been fitted with great care and nicety, are, as a rule, eight in number."

The chariot probably came into Egypt with the horse about the time of the Oriental pastoral kings (2098-1587 B.C.), and it came as a fully developed vehicle.

In the early Cyprian tombs clay models of chariots have been found; these are modelled with solid wheels, but sometimes spokes are painted on the clay; other models, though decorated with structural details, are almost certainly in tended to represent vehicles with block-wheels. On the sarcophagi and on some vases the chariots have spokes. Messrs. Perrot and Chipiez,' while admitting that all war chariots had a strong family likeness to each other, deny that the artist borrowed from Assyrian sources, and state their belief that he went no farther than his native city; " even the wheel-spokes are different; they are more solid and heavy in the Cypriot example, the wheelwright who made them has less skill than his Mesopotamian rival.”

To come nearer home, a beautiful bronze bucket was dis'G. Perrot and C. Chipiez, A History of Art in Chaldea and Assyria, ii., P. 75.

A History of Art in Phænicia and Cyprus, i., p. 209; ii., pp. 181, 310, et seq.

covered in 1891 on the banks of the Danube,' about thirtyseven miles to the east of Vienna. It belonged to the period of transition between those of Hallstadt and La Tène, that is to say, about the commencement of the fourth century B.C., or at the time when iron was replacing bronze for cutting implements in that part of Europe. Amongst other subjects a chariot race is engraved on this bucket, or situla. The wheels of the chariots are either block-wheels with four nearly circular perforations, or spoke-wheels with four very broad spokes; this was evidently the character of the

FIG. 26.

Celtic Chariot, from the Göttweiger Situla; after Szombathy.

wheels of the war chariots of the Celts; we may assume that those of their waggons were of yet ruder construction.

The Roman evidence has been conveniently summarised by J. Yates and G. E. Marindin in their article on the Plaustrum. The body consisted of a platform, with or without sides; these were upright boards or open-work rails, or a large wicker basket was fastened on the platform. The wheels ordinarily had no spokes,' but were solid, of the kind called tympana, or" drums," nearly a foot in thickness, and

'J. Szombathy," Die Göttweiger Situla," Correspondenz-Blatt Deutsch Anth. Gesell, xxiii., 1892, p. 9.

A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, edited by W. Smith, W. Wayte, and G. E. Marindin, 1891. The plaustrum was a heavy twowheeled cart; the four-wheeled was the plaustrum majus.

Non sunt radiata, Prob. ad Verg. Georg., i., 165.

made either by sawing them whole from the trunk of a tree or by nailing together boards. These wheels were fastened to the axle, which revolved within wooden rings attached to the under side of the platform. Although these wheels were excellent for the preservation of the roads, they turned with a long circuit, and advanced slowly and with a creaking sound.' They were usually drawn by oxen, but sometimes by mules. The Greek apasa corresponded both to the plaustrum and the plaustrum majus; "the four-wheeled wain" is mentioned in the Odyssey, ix., 241, and Herodotus, i., 188.

Professor Tylor figures an ox-waggon that is carved on the Antonine Column; it appears to have solid wheels, and the square end of the axle proves that it and its drum-wheels turned round together. He points out that the ancient Roman farm-carts were mostly made with wheels built up of several pieces of wood nailed together, "as are their successors which are used to this day with wonderfully little change, as in Greece and Portugal.” The bullock-cart of the Azores' is a striking relic from the classic world; "its wheels are studded with huge iron nails by way of tire.' Although the block-wheel was still in use in the

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FIG. 27.

Agricultural Scene on a Vase in the Campana Collection, Louvre; after Duruy. Italy of the Roman Empire, spoke-wheels were also employed even for agricultural vehicles, but I have been unable to gather any Italian evidence of the transition stages.

1 Stridentia plaustra, Verg. Georg., iii., 536.

2 Bullar, Winter in the Azores, i., p. 121; cf. Tylor, loc. cit., fig. 12, p. 80. 3 E. B. Tylor, "On the Origin of the Plough and Wheel-Carriage," Journ. Anth. Inst., x., 1880, p. 80.

My friend, Mr. J. L. Myers, of Christchurch, Oxford, has very kindly given me several references to early Greek chariot wheels which have supplied links in the evolution of spokes that I was in search of. The block-wheel is shown in A, Fig. 30. This is evidently a built-up wheel, but there is no rim or felloe to it.

Wheels with three spokes, evidently derived from this, are figured by Duruy from various sources.' The spirited little agricultural scene (Fig. 27), depicted on a vase in the Campana collection in the Louvre, gives a clue to the structure of the wheel, which is seen on a larger scale on another vase (Fig. 28), copied by Duruy from Gerhard.' The wheel

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Ancient Greek Carriage on a Vase; after Duruy, from Gerhard.

(B, Fig. 30) figured by Harrison and Verrall' from an archaic Greek plate in the British Museum of the sixth century B.C., which also consists of three spokes, is another example of the same type of wheel. A variety with two

IV. Duruy, Histoire des Grecs, 1887, i., pp. 251, 373. 732.

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Auserlesene Vasenbilder, Taf. ccxvii.

Jane Harrison and Margaret Verrall, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, 1890, p. 289, fig. 30.

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