Machines have been invented which consist of hard iron or steel rollers on the surface of which are cut beautiful patterns, and between which wood previously softened by steam is passed, and designs thus impressed thereon. A similar process of embossing, was devised in Paris and called Xyloplasty, by which steam-softened wood is compressed in carved moulds, which give it bas-relief impressions. But in the carving of wood by hand, a beautiful art, which has been revived within the past generation, there are touches of sentiment, taste and human toil, which, like the touches of the painter and the master of music, appeal to cultivated minds in a higher than mechanical sense. The mills of the modern gods, the inventors, grind with exceeding and exact fineness, but the work of a human hand upon a manufactured article still appeals to human sympathy. The bending of wood when heated by fire or steam had been known and practised to a limited extent, but Blanchard invented a _clamping machine_, to which improvements have been added, and by which ship timbers, furniture, ploughs, piano frames, carriage bows, stair and house banisters and balusters, wheel rims, staves, etc., etc., are bent to the desired forms, and without breaking. Bending to a certain extent does not weaken wood, but stretching the same has been found to impair and destroy its strength. The principal problems which the inventors of the century have solved in the class of wood-working have been the adaptation to rapid-working machinery of the saw and other blades, to sever; the plane to smooth, the auger, the bit and the gimlet to bore, the hammer to drive, and a combination of all or a part of these to shape and finish the completed article. It was a great step from the reciprocating hand saw, worked painfully by one or two men, to the band saw, invented by a London mechanic, William Newbury, in 1808. This was an endless steel belt serrated on one edge, mounted on pulleys, and driven continuously by the power of steam through the hardest and the heaviest work. Pliable, to conform to the faces of the wheels over which it is carried, it will bend with all the sinuosities of long timber, no time is lost in its operation, and no labour of human hands is necessary to guide it or the object on which it works.