Some machines are known as “Universal Wood Workers.” In these a single machine is provided with various tools, and adapted to perform a great variety of work by shifting the position of the material and the tools. The following operations can be performed on such a machine:--Planing, bevelling, tapering, tenoning, tongueing and grooving (grooves straight, circular or angular), making of joints, twisting and a number of other operations. The later invention by Stow of Philadelphia of a _flexible_ shaft, made up of a series of coils of steel wire, given a leather covering, and to which can be attached augers, bits, or metal drills, the tool applied to its work from any direction, and its direction varied while at work, has excited great attention. _Shingles_ are as old in the art as the framework of buildings. Rome was roofed with shingles for centuries, made of oak or pine. Tiles, plain and fancy, and slates, have to a certain extent superseded wood shingling, but the wood will always be used where it can be found in plenty, as machines will now turn them out complete faster than they can be hauled away. A shingle is a thin piece of wood, thicker at one end than at the other, having parallel sides, about three times as long as it is wide, having generally smooth surfaces and edges. All these features are now given to the shingle by modern machines. A great log is rolled into a mill at one end and soon comes out at the other in bundles of shingles; the logs sawed into blocks, the blocks split or sawed again into shingle sizes, tapered, planed in the direction of the grain of the wood, the complete shingles collected and bound in bundles, each operation by a special machine, or by a series of mechanisms. _Veneering_, that art of covering cheap or ordinary wood with a thin covering of more ornamental and valuable wood, known from the days of the Egyptians, has been vastly extended by modern machinery. The practice, however, so emphatically denounced centuries ago by Pliny, as “the monstrous invention of paint and dyes applied to the woods or veneers, to imitate other woods,” has yet its practitioners and admirers.