Treatise on Mills and Millwork. Part II. By William Fairbaim,
Esq., C.E. (Longman and Co.)—This valuable work is now completed, and we doubt not that it will receive from engineers the reception to which its merits fully entitle it. This part contains two sections ; one on machinery of transmission, and the other on the arrangement of mills. The first comprises an elaborate treatise on wheels and pulleys, together with tables of their proportions computed from data with which the author's professional experience has supplied him, and also a complete account of couplings for shafts and engaging and disengaging gear. The second section is of a rather less exclusively technical character. The author tells us that in the year 1827 he succeeded in persuading a proprietor for whom he was erecting a mill to allow him to form the corners into pilasters, and put a slight cornice round the building. From this slight beginning sprang that desire for some architectural effect which has culminated in the magnificent facade of the Saltaire factory. From appreciation of design it was easy to pass to improvements in the general arrangement of the buildings, and their adaptation for the reception of the different kinds of machinery. The wish for excellence of form is not a mere ostentatious love of outside show. Mr. Fairbairn, of course, pursues his subject through all its various appiications, and gives us his views as to the best mode of constructing corn, cotton, woollen, flax, silk, oil, paper, powder, and iron mills, which are made more intelligible by care- ful plans and sections of mills which he has himself erected in various parts of the world. "It is a book which no engineer's library should be without.'
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