the cart has to be propped up behind by a couple of stakes; or, to put it in other words, boards are laid across the side rails of such a cart as that figured in the Tour in Ireland.

There are contemporary engravings of other carts published towards the end of last century, which represent very similar carts—in counties Dublin and Wicklow, for example -but in which the wheels are outside of the shafts; as no linch-pin is drawn we must assume that in these too the axle revolved along with the wheels.

These carts are described in the following manner by Twiss in his anonymously published book, A Tour in Ireland in 1775:

"Goods are conveyed about the city on small two-wheeled cars, drawn by a single horse; the wheels are thin round blocks, each about twenty inches in diameter. The wheels of those cars which are used in the country are placed at a greater distance from each other than those of city cars."

Quite similar cars may still be seen in use in the north of

Ireland, from County Donegal to County Down. The wheels may be within the shafts and with a revolving axle; now, however, the latter is usually quite slender; or the wheels may be outside the shafts and with a linch-pin, showing that the axle is fixed and that the wheels alone revolve. Planks may be movably attached to the edges of the platform, or the sides may be permanently fastened, and so a cart, as opposed to what is more correctly termed a float or a lorry, is evolved.

The North Irish peasant farmer, when he wishes to crush. the clods of earth on his dry fields, will lift the cart with its shafts off the wheels, and replace them on a wooden roller, resembling the sketch on page 135, and to increase its effectiveness he puts stones into the cart. The cart, save for its platform, thus reverts to the stage of the first "missing link."

"In Borrowdale it is on record that wheeled vehicles did not make their appearance till about 1770; and when these novelties did reach the lakes, they were clumsy and awkward in character. Clog-wheels were the first type used on farm carts, and there are still old men of between eighty and ninety years, who can remember them in use. The wheels are clumsy discs of wood, joined by a great beam or axle, which is firmly fastened to them. The wheels are 1 ft. 10 ins. in diameter, and 3 ins. wide in the tyre, where the iron bands or 'strakes' are formed by three pieces nailed to the wood. The distance between the wheels is 3 ft. 2 ins.'

But the cart is, so to speak, only half fledged; it moves along slowly and heavily on its small, solid wheels.

The evolution of the spoke-wheel was probably a slow affair, and its stages are missing from Ireland, so we must turn elsewhere for evidence.

'H. Swainson Cowper, "Some Old-Fashioned Contrivances in Lakeland," The Reliquary and Illustrated Archeologist, iv., 1898, p. 20.

The employment of spoke-wheels is, however, of great antiquity. Messrs. Perrot and Chipiez note that:

"Not one of the Assyrian military pictures can be named in which war chariots do not appear, and they are by no means the heavy and clumsy cars now used in some parts both of European and Asiatic Turkey. Their wheels are far from being those solid discs of timber that are alone capable of resisting the inequalities of a roadless country. They have not the lightness of a modern carriage, with its tires of beaten steel, but the felloes of their wheels are light and graceful enough to prove that the roads of those times were better than anything the Mesopotamia of today can show. The spokes, which seem to have been fitted with great care and nicety, are, as a rule, eight in number."

The chariot probably came into Egypt with the horse about the time of the Oriental pastoral kings (2098-1587 B.C.), and it came as a fully developed vehicle.

In the early Cyprian tombs clay models of chariots have been found; these are modelled with solid wheels, but sometimes spokes are painted on the clay; other models, though decorated with structural details, are almost certainly in tended to represent vehicles with block-wheels. On the sarcophagi and on some vases the chariots have spokes. Messrs. Perrot and Chipiez,' while admitting that all war chariots had a strong family likeness to each other, deny that the artist borrowed from Assyrian sources, and state their belief that he went no farther than his native city; "even the wheel-spokes are different; they are more solid and heavy in the Cypriot example, the wheelwright who made them has less skill than his Mesopotamian rival."

To come nearer home, a beautiful bronze bucket was dis'G. Perrot and C. Chipiez, A History of Art in Chaldea and Assyria, ii., P. 75.

A History of Art in Phenicia and Cyprus, i., p. 209; ii., pp. 181, 310, et seq.