an artificer who makes coops, casks, tubs, or barrels, i.e., all kinds of wooden vessels bound together by hoops. See Encycl.

The art of the cooper appears to be of great antiquity, and to have very soon attained to all the perfection which it possesses at present. This being the case, it is obvious that we can communicate no instruction to Cooper himself, and, on the subject of his art, very little that could be interesting to our other readers. In the Encyclopedie Methodique there is a long and verbose account of the tools or instruments employed by the cooper; of the kinds of timber proper for the different kinds of casks; of the methods of preparing the wood for his various purposes; of the manner in which he ought to hold the plane when dressing the staves; and of the time when it is proper to put the staves together, or, in other words, to mount the cask. From this detail we shall extract such particulars as appear to us to be least generally known, though perhaps of no great importance in themselves.

Notwithstanding the antiquity of the art of cask-building, there are some countries in which even now it is wholly unknown; and others where, though it is sufficiently known, yet, from the scarcity of wood or some other cause, earthen vessels, and skins lined with pitch, are preferred to wooden barrels for the holding and transporting of liquors. The Latin word dolium, which we translate "a cask," was employed by the Romans to denote earthen vessels used for this purpose; though the word dolare, from which it is derived, applies very well to our casks, which are composed of several pieces of wood hewn from the same tree, and fitted by planes before they be joined together. We are indeed certain that casks of the same kind with our own were in use among the Romans before the Christian era; for both Varro and Columella, in treating of the rural economy of their days, speak of vessels formed of several flaves of wood bound together by circles or hoops. The merit of having invented such vessels is given by Pliny to certain people who lived at the foot of the Alps, and who in his days lined their casks with pitch.

At what period the fabrication of casks was introduced into Britain is unknown to us, though it is probable that we derived the art from the French, who might have it from the Romans.

We need hardly inform any of our readers, that a cask has the appearance of two truncated cones joined at their bases, or that the part where the junction appears to be made being the most capacious, or that of which the diameter is the largest, is vulgarly called the belly of the cask. These cones, however, were they completed, would not be regular, but rather conoids, being formed of pieces of timber, or flaves, which are not straight lines as in the cone, but are curved from the vertex to the base.

In choosing his wood, if he can have a choice, the cooper prefers old and thick and straight trees, from which he hews thin planks to be formed into staves; and in France, where this art is practised on a large scale, the winter months are allotted for the preparation of the staves and bottoms, and the summer for putting them together or mounting the cask. The author of the article in the Encyclopedie Methodique directs the cooper, when dressing the flaves with the plane, to cut the wood always across; a practice which we doubt not is proper, though we think it would not be easy to assign the reason of it. Planing is the most laborious and difficult part of the work; and there are but few coopers who plane quickly, and at the same time well. In shops where the work is distributed into parts, planning is reckoned a great object; and in France, before the revolution, a good planter gained from three shillings and threepence sterling to four shillings and three farthings a-day.

In forming the staves, it must never be forgotten that each is to constitute part of a double conoid; that it must therefore be broadest at the middle, becoming gradually, though not in straight lines, narrower towards the extremities; that the outside across the wood must be wrought into the segment of a circle; and that the stave must be thickest near the middle, growing thinner, by very gentle degrees, towards the ends. To adjust accurately these different curves (for even the narrowing of the staves must be in a curve) to the size and intended shape of the cask, would require either great experience, or a larger portion of mathematical science than we have reason to think that many cooper's possess. With respect to the inside of the stave, it is of little consequence whether it be rounded into the segment of a circle or not, and therefore the cooper very seldom takes that trouble.

The staves being all dressed and ready to be arranged in a circular form, it might be thought necessary, in order to make the seams tight, to trim the thin edges, which are to be joined together, in such a manner as that a ray passing from the outside of the cask through a seam to the centre, should touch the contiguous staves from the exterior to the interior side; in other words, that the thin edges should be sloped as the archstones of a bridge are sloped, so that the contiguous staves may be brought into firm contact throughout the whole joint. This, however, is not the practice of the cooper. With great propriety he brings the contiguous staves into contact at their inner surfaces only; so that by driving the hoops hard, he can make the joints much closer than he could possibly have done had the edges of the staves been so sloped as to permit them to touch each other throughout before being drove together by the compression of the hoops. This, together with giving to the staves the proper curvature, seems to be the only part of the cooper's work which deserves the name of art; for the driving of the hoops and the forming of the bottoms could certainly be accomplished by any carpenter, we had almost said by any man, though he had never seen a hoop driven or a bottom formed.

In many parts of Scotland, instead of ale or beer mugs, they use small hooped wooden vessels, of which the staves are feather-edged or dove-tailed into one another. This, as the staves are of different colours, increases the beauty of the vessel, and to a superficial observer appears to be an ingenious contrivance; but it adds nothing to the strength or tightness of the seam, and cannot be attended with the smallest difficulty. We think, indeed, that in a large cask or tub it would prove injurious to the seam; for either these dove-tails must be very thin slips raised from the interior edges of the staves, which in many cases could not be done if the wood were thoroughly seasoned; or if they be cut out like inverted wedges, the contiguous staves must be brought into contact from the interior to the exterior side previous to the driving of the hoops; and in that case, as we have seen, the seams could not be made completely tight.