A curious piece of mechanism has been invented, and is in use in most large London furniture workshops, for _carving by steam_. Besides boring out and cutting away superfluous material, there is an engine for making mechanical sculpture in bas-relief, or the round. The wood is fixed on a metal table, which is moved to and fro and up and down, so as to come in contact with a revolving cutter held above it. The wood is then shaped and cut, according as it is elevated or moved. There are three or four cutters, and one piece of wood may be placed under each. Under the middle cutter, replaced by a dummy tool that does not really cut, the workman places his cast or model, and makes the dummy cutter pass over every undulation of its surface. The two or three cutters on either side cut the corresponding blocks exactly to the same depths and undulations as are followed by the blunt tool. It is a _copying machine_. That such copies, though they may pass muster, will ever have the charm of original carving, the reader shall not be asked to believe.
Certain elaborate methods of decorating and finishing woodwork must now be described, viz. those known as _inlaying_ and _marquetry_. These two processes are distinct, but marquetry furniture has often portions decorated with inlaying, as also carved ornaments and decorations of beaten, cast, or chiselled metal-work. This last addition is not generally of the same importance in our modern English woodwork that it was a century ago, and I will describe the former methods first.
_Inlaying_ means the insertion of pieces of more costly wood, stone, small discs, or carved pieces of ivory, into a less valuable material. The process is as old as any manufacture in wood working of which we possess records. Beautiful plates or blocks of ivory can be seen in the Assyrian gallery of the British museum, found at Nineveh by Mr. Layard. They are deeply cut with lotus and other leaf decorations, figures and hieroglyphics, and most of them have an Egyptian character. The ivory figures, too, have been inlaid and filled up with vitrified material. Remains of these decorations are still discernible, and the thickness of many of these pieces of ivory shows that they have been sunk bodily into woodwork of a solid character.