In following the style and ornamentation of former periods, our new machinery is in no sense a help to us. The man who cuts out his material for a Sheraton chair _felt_ what he was going to carve upon, chose his pieces, arranged the grain, and the spare material just as he would require it, with careful reference to the use of his carving tools from first to last. _The pace_, too, required in executing orders was then more deliberate; costly and elaborate plant and machinery not being required, provincial workmen of admirable skill were to be found in many towns. There is no royal process by which we can put a log of wood into one end of an engine, and find a chair, a table, or a cabinet at the other. What steam machinery does for us is to perform with certainty, and with immense rapidity, the simple operations of sawing, planing, boring, and turning. It is by turnery that ornamentation is done in the engine. Any length of moulded edges can be soon turned out, any amount of the parts of panelling, of turned rails, and of ornaments turned on flat surfaces pressed on the cutting tool, together with the piercing of fretwork and curved and shaped edges to boards. The saw being a fixture in this instance, is an advantage, but machine turnery is not rich in resources. The tool itself is filed laboriously to the mould required, and the wood merely pressed against it. When the wood revolves (as in the old lathe), the turner, with the simple edge of his chisel or his gouge, was the master of an endless variety of ornament limited only by his fancy or skill of hand.
It is nevertheless in the turnery and the fret-cutting machinery, that a furniture artist must find the elements of a style. The man of genius, the poet and maker, who can throw himself into these elements, will do wonders with them. The lathe is as old as history. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, turned wood furniture was made in considerable quantities in this country, in Italy, and in the Indian possessions of the Portuguese. All the furniture of Arabs, Moors, and Turks springs from the lathe and the moulding plane; the tables and stools, the ingenious reticulation of Cairene geometrical panelling, the screens of woodwork so effective in the queen of Arab cities and in Damascus are derived from these humble sources.