15. Elm is a timber of most singular use; especially where it may lie continually dry, or wet, in extreams; therefore proper for water-works, mills, the ladles, and soles of the wheel, pipes, pumps, aquæ-ducts, pales, ship-planks beneath the water-line; and some that has been found buried in bogs has turned like the most polish’d and hardest ebony, only discerned by the grain: Also for wheel-wrights, handles for the single hand-saw, rails and gates made of elm (thin sawed) is not so apt to rive as oak: The knotty for naves, hubs; the straight and smooth for axle-trees, and the very roots for curiously dappled works, scarce has any superior for kerbs of coppers, featheridge, and weather-boards, (but it does not without difficulty, admit the nail without boreing) chopping-blocks, blocks for the hat-maker, trunks, and boxes to be covered with leather; coffins, for dressers and shovel-board-tables of great length, and a lustrous colour if rightly seasoned; also for the carver, by reason of the tenor of the grain, and toughness which fits it for all those curious works of frutages, foliage, shields, statues, and most of the ornaments appertaining to the orders of architecture, and for not being much subject to warping; I find that of old they used it even for hinges and hooks of doors; but then, that part of the plank which grew towards the top of the tree, was in work to be always reversed; and for that it is not so subject to rift; Vitruvius commends it both for tenons and mortaises: But besides these, and sundry other employments, it makes also the second sort of charcoal; and finally, (which I must not omit) the use of the very leaves of this tree, especially of the female, is not to be despis’d; for being suffered to dry in the sun upon the branches, and the spray strip’d off about the decrease in August (as also where the suckers and stolones are super-numerary, and hinder the thriving of their nurses) they will prove a great relief to cattel in winter, and scorching summers, when hay and fodder is dear they will eat them before oats, and thrive exceedingly well with them; remember only to lay your boughs up in some dry and sweet corner of your barn: It was for this the poet prais’d them, and the epithet was advis’d, fruitful in leaves the elm.{74:1}