the mason for a frame
rather than a support adopted on smaller machines than is necessary?
Is it necessary even in a planing machine of forty feet length of bed
and a thirty foot table? Could not the bed be cast in three pieces,
the center a rectangular box, 5 or 6 or 7 feet square, 20 feet long,
with internal end flanges, ways planed on its upper surface, and ends
squared off, a monster, perhaps, but if our civil engineers wanted
such a casting for a bridge, they'd get it. Add to this central
section two bevel pieces of half the length, and set the whole down
through the floor where your masonry would have been and rest the
whole on two cross walls, and you would have a structure that if once
made true would remain so regardless of external influences. Cost?
Yes; and so do Frodsham watches--more than "Waterbury."

It may be claimed, in fact, I have seen lathes resting on six and
eight feet, engines on ten, and a planing machine on a dozen. Do they
remain true? Sometimes they do, and many times they do not. Is the
principle right? Not when it can be avoided; and when it cannot be
avoided, the true principle of foundation building should be
employed.... A strange example of depending on the stone foundation
for not simply support, but to resist strain, may be found in the
machines used for beveling the edges of boiler plate. Not so
particularly strange that the first one might have, like Topsy,
"growed," but strange because each builder copies the original. You
will remember it, a complete machine set upon a stone foundation, to
straighten and hold a plate, and another complete machine set down by
the side of it and bolted to the same stone to plane off the edge; a
lot of wasted material and a lot of wasted genius, it always seems to
me. Going around Robin Hood's barn is the old comparison. Why not hook
the tool carriage on the side of the clamping structure, and thus
dispense with one of the frames altogether?

Many of the modern builders of what Chordal calls the hyphen Corliss
engine claim to have made a great advance by putting a post under the
center of the frame, but whether in acknowledgment that the frame
would be likely to go down or the stonework come up I could never make
out. What I should fear would be that the stone would come up and take
the frame with it. Every brick mason knows better than to bed mortar
under the center of a window sill; and this putting a prop under the
center of an engine girder see