_Mess._ Birds and none else; no bricklayer of Egypt, No stone-hewer was there, no carpenter: With their own hands they did it, to my marvel. There came from Libya thirty thousand cranes, All having swallowed down foundation-stones, Which with their beaks the rails still aptly shaped: Another party of ten thousand storks Were brick-makers: and water from below The plovers and the other wading birds Were raising up into the higher air. _Peisth._ And who conveyed the mortar[323] for them? _Mess._ Herons, In hods (λεκάναισιν). _Peisth._ And how did they get in the mortar? _Mess._ That was the cleverest device of all, sir. The geese with their webbed feet, as though with spades (ἄμαις), Dipp’d down, and laid it neatly on the hods. _Peisth._ What feat indeed may not be wrought with feet? _Mess._ Aye, and the ducks, by Jove, all tightly girt, Kept carrying bricks, and other birds were flying, With trowel on their head, to lay the bricks; And then, like children sucking lollipops, The swallows minced the mortar in their mouths. (Kennedy’s Trans.) Sun-dried bricks were known as πλίνθοι ὠμαί (_lateres crudi_); baked bricks as πλίνθοι ὠπταί (_lateres cocti_ or _coctiles_). The Romans also used the word _testa_ for baked brick, corresponding to the Greek κέραμος. Vitruvius[324] distinguishes three varieties of unburnt bricks, as used by the Greeks. One, known as “Lydian,” was also used by the Romans, who named the bricks from their length _sesquipedales_; their size was 1½ by 1 ft. The other two, exclusively Greek, were known as πεντάδωρον and τετράδωρον, the word δῶρον signifying a “palm” or three inches; in other words, they were respectively fifteen inches and one foot square. The former was used for public buildings, the latter for private houses, and they were arranged in the walls in courses of alternate whole and half bricks, as is frequently done at the present day. Vitruvius also speaks of bricks made at Pitane in Mysia, and in Spain, which were so light that they would float in water.[325] He advises that bricks should not be made of sandy or pebbly clay, which makes them heavy and prevents the straw from cohering, so that they fall to pieces after wet. Many other directions are given by him,[326] but are too lengthy to quote here. Bricks were made in a mould called πλαίσιον, a rectangular framework of boards[327]; and the sun-dried bricks were, as we learn from the passage quoted above, made by collecting the clay with shovels (ἄμαι) into troughs (λεκάναι) and working it with the feet.[328] It is probable that we have some