finely-taken one-must have been a cheering companion in many a lonely hour of her declining years. She loved to show it, and tell its story to her friends, and hence our knowledge of the same, and, subsequently, through the kindness of her much bereaved husband, Dr. M. W. Woodward, the copy-reduced in size-procured by us for this periodical. In her memorial article, Mrs. Woodward speaks of the original interior architecture, ornaments, spacious hall and parlors of this house, at the time of her father's occupancy, as betokening the residence of a family of wealth and high social position, in the olden time. And such its history shows it to have been, as more recently learned from the Rev. Dr. Messler, who has been the pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church in Somerville for the last half century and upwards. He informs us that "the date on the old house is 1736. It was built by Andrew Coeyman, a brother of the owner of the Coeyman Manor, below Albany. The last of the name was Lieutenant Staats Coeyman, of the Navy forty years since. One of the granddaughters was Mrs. George Paterson, and another descendant, Mrs. Stephen Van Rensselaer, of Albany, was a great-granddaughter."

A centennial fact in the record of this historic house was also mentioned by Mrs. Woodward, viz. : that in its parlors, oft scenes of joy as well as of sorrow, an old friend of hers, a lady of Revolutionary associations, had the honor of dancing with Lafayette, who was in New Jersey so much during the War of Independence.

What is above given formed the substance of an article under the heading of "An Ancient Parsonage," from the hand of the present writer, published in the Christian Intelligencer, November 9, 1876. And to this were appropriately appended some very interesting additional particulars, by C. D. Deshler, Esq., its then acting editor, received from his near family relative, Mrs. Theophilus M. Holcombe, an aged lady residing in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who is of the Coeyman lineage, and "the best living authority in the matters of its genealogy. Her statement, slightly abridged, is as follows: "Andreas Coejiemans," the original Dutch of the name, "built, or caused to be built, this house, and he imported both the building materials, and in part, the furniture which adorned it. He was the son of the widow Gurtrud, who came hither from Holland, with two sons, Andreas and Pieter. She purchased a patent of land on the

Hudson River, where the now town of Coeymans is, which was named in honor of her. Andrew settled in the Jersies'—so then called. He married the daughter of Dr. Samuel Staats, of Albany, and had, born of her, one son and five daughters. The son, Samuel Staats Coeyman, inherited the homestead, and also, as was the custom, some family relics. He married Ariantze Schuyler, of New Brunswick. They had two children, Andrew, and Gertrude, the mother of Mrs. Holcombe, and the wife of the late Capt. George Farmer, of that city. Andrew, as male heir, on the death of his father came into possession of the place, and lived and died there, deceasing in 1804. Under the sod of the modern manufacturing village of Raritan, which now covers the ancient Coeyman farm of several hundred acres, and on the beautiful river slope, he sleeps, with three generations before him, the last of his race in Somerville." And the timeworn monument made mention of to us by Mrs. Woodward, within the ample house grounds, left a lasting impression on the memory of the young inhabitants of the Vredenburgh parsonage. But what a change time and the hand of modern im provement have wrought in all the former surroundings! The old orchards, gardens, fruit and shade trees, and old residents, all gone; nothing left to tell the tale of that silent past, but the brave old house. And it too, will, no doubt, soon follow the rest, and disappear from the face of the earth. But its picture is now destined to a long perpetuity, thanks to the conserving care of the excellent Mrs. Woodward, and the illustrative pages of POTTER'S AMERICAN Monthly.

May this engraving of the substantial, faithfully enduring domicile of her honorable Holland progenitors in New Jersey-so typical of their national character-long be a pleasant memento of them, in the house of her earthly pilgrimage, to the venerable lady whose historical and genealogical knowledge her family, and also the general antiquarian public, now have so much reason to value.

Nor can we better close the present record, than by here quoting entire the graphic concluding paragraph of her opportune supplement, through Mr. Deshler, her son-in-law, to our first account of this ancient house, given in that ably-conducted organ of the sound old Dutch Reformed Church in America, the Christian Intelligencer:

"I recollect making a visit at this house, at the

WHEN yet the inhabitants of our planet were sparsely scattered over its surface there was little or no opportunity for intercourse between the isolated communities wherein they dwelt. Thus it came to pass that the discoveries of wise men, discoveries which might have been productive of blessings to all posterity, were lost with the decay of the community in which they had been known, and the entire weary process of investigation must be gone through with later before similar results could be again attained.

The ancient Egyptians, for example, understood how to fuse the most diverse metals directly from rude ore. They were most skillful metallurgists; but this art was lost during the long period of decay which followed the golden age of civilization. The art of casting bronze over iron, which has recently come up among us, was already known to the ancient Assyrians. Of late we hear of the reëstablishment of the manufacture of a malleable glass which was known in the days of Tiberius. At that time, as Pliny tells us, the laboratory of the discoverer was destroyed in order that copper, silver and gold should not be dishonored, as it was feared they would be through the introduction of malleable glass.

Our technical scientists are constantly liable to fall into the grossest blunders if they do not keep themselves informed on the history of discovery.

In the lengthy disputes which preceded the completion of the Suez canal, a prominent rôle was played by a supposition that a difference of some ten metres existed between the altitudes of the Red and the Mediterranean Seas. Laplace declared this to be an impossibility, proving the level of the sea's surface to be the same all over the world; but it was not until after repeated experiments that the engineers would be convinced that their instruments instead of his statement were at fault. Precisely the same point had been argued by the engineers of two thousand years previous, during the opening of the Corinth canal, and then it was Strabo, supported by the authority of Archimedes, who settled the dispute.

was confined to the favored few, and mathematicians, as well as astronomers, priests, architects, sculptors and painters, were obliged in the public interest to execute work which in our day is entrusted to the common laborer. With the advance of civilization and the accumulation of wealth and power in different localities naturally arose a division of labor, and kings and rulers, striving after glory and magnificence, undertook the erection of costly palaces, superb temples and gigantic monuments. The post of court architect then became highly honorable and lucrative. Thus we see graven on the most ancient quarries of Egypt the pedigree for twenty-three generations of one of the Psammetic court architects. All his ancestors had been architects like himself, and all had been endowed with high priestly honors. Whether the calling which they represented was fraught with blessing thereby, deponent sayeth not. As much as seven hundred years before our era royal architects had been appointed in Assyria, as we are thoroughly apprised by ancient tablets, and as for the ancient Roman architects we recognize their status in the magnificent works which they have left behind them, and which serve as models for modern architecture.

And, as architecture had its origin and first brilliant prosperity in the East, so was it also with the science of engineering. Whether the Chaldeans and Babylonians independently developed the latter or whether they borrowed it from the ancient Egyptians remains an open question. Each were an agricultural people, inhabiting a fruitful plain, traversed by a mighty stream, which only required irrigation to be productive of almost exhaustless grain harvests. Under like necessities were devised in both places, some four thousand years ago, the most ingenious means of irrigation, whose ruins fill us with astonishment unto this day, when even the names of the engineers who planned them have been long lost in oblivion.

were selected the largest, most enduring stones, in order that the structures they were to compose might defy the ravages of time. Engineers were called upon to lend a helping hand in removing the stone from the quarry to the place of its destination, metal-workers had their part to play in preparing the implements of transportation, and thus architecture, engineering, and metallurgy all gained an important impetus from religious workings.

The most ancient stone structures, the date of whose erection we can approximate, are the pyramids of Gizeh. They were sacred edifices, esteemed even more sacred than the temples and royal palaces, erected as places of concealment for the earthly remains of the kings, whose souls, in accordance with ancient Egyptian belief, would return to take possession thereof after the lapse of three thousand years. Although constructed four thousand years ago, the masonry of the pyramids, aided by Egypt's propitious climate, is to-day in a state of perfect preservation, a miracle to all beholders. Almost beyond computation was the amount of human power brought into requisition by the kings in the transportation of the needful blocks from the quarries to the building sites, and even the statue of Rameses the Great, which weighed 800 tons, was moved by men, as the wellpreserved panel representations show us.

When the numbers of the objects to be moved increased, when they became heavier and more colossal in proportions, mere human power must of necessity have become exhausted in the effort of transportation. Flesh and bones alone no longer sufficed. When the huge block, weighing 1200 tons, on which now stands the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, in St. Petersburg, was carried to its place of destination, it was found almost impossible to supply a sufficient amount of power; even the iron cylinders on which it was rolled were crushed, and must be replaced by a harder metal. The old Egyptians, in order to further the progress of their huge granite blocks and colossal statues, made granite roads from the shores of the Nile to the place of erection, and Herodotus, who saw these, admired them more than he did the pyramids. While we find the old Egyptian mode of moving colossal statues frequently depicted, we have no authority upon their manner of erecting obelisks weighing 400 tons, certainly a far more difficult task than the transportation of the heavy blocks.

Monolites, similar to those of the Egyptians, were erected by other nations; none of them, however, were as tall as those of the ancient inhabitants of the Nile valley, and the Egyptian obelisks in Paris and Rome are the tallest of their kind in Europe. In the temples of Baalbec, erected under Roman government. we find the largest stones which have been used since the structures of the Pharaohs; but they do not by any means equal these. The removal of these stones must constantly have given rise to reflections concerning the feasibility of replacing the enormous expenditure of human strength by mechanical contrivances. Putting such thoughts into practice, however, was dependent on metals.

Often has the question been started whether the ancient Egyptians were acquainted with steel; yet there seems to be no reason for supposing this not to be the case. Iron was known from the earliest historic period to the races within our horizon; it is copiously mentioned in the Bible and in Homer. On the wall-paintings of the Egyptian tombs in Thebes we see butchers sharpening their knives on pieces of metal of a bluish coloring which unquestionably represent steel. Iron is found in enormous quantities about the ruins of the Assyrian palaces, and the inscriptions on the tiles tell us of the iron fetters of the prisoners. Even in the Great Pyramids is found a piece of iron which must have lain there four thousand years. Certainly a great age for a metal which is so liable to be destroyed by rust!

The iron which the Africans of the present day prepare by simply melting the ore over charcoal, is most nearly related to our forged iron; and similar to it we must conclude was the simple preparation of iron employed by the ancient Egyptians. There is required but a slight addition of carbon to such iron and the result is steel; indeed steel is often unintentionally retained in the primitive clay ovens of the Africans. Why then should it have been unknown to the Egyptians? It was unquestionably discovered and employed by them in their masterly works, as is assumed by Sir John Hawkshaw, who is our authority for the historic dates of this paper.

A second basis for the impetus to our industry

and technical skill is coal. As early as 1611 a patent was taken out in England for smelting iron ore by means of stone coal; but this method did not become common there until the last century.