Andrea Palladio · The First Book
Chapter II. Of Timber
VITRUVIUS tells us, in the ninth chapter of his second book, that timber ought to be felled in autumn, or during the winter season, in the wane of the moon; for then the trees recover the vigour and solidity that in spring and sammer vas dispersed among their leaves and fruit. It will, moreover, be free from a certain moisture, very apt to engender worms, and rot it, which at that time will be consumed and dried up. ought likewise to be cat but to the middle of the pith, and so left until it is thoroughly dry, that the moisture, the cause of putreiadhon, may gradually distil and drop away.
When fell'd, it must be laid in proper place, where jt may be flicker'd from the south sun, high winds, and rain. That of a spontaneous growth especially ought to be fully dried, and daubed over with cow-dung, to prevent its splitting. It should not be drawn through the dew, but removed rather in the afternoon; nor wrought when wet and damp, or very dry: the one being apt to cause rottenness, and the other to make clumsy work. Neither will it less than three years be dry enough to be made use of in planks for the floors, windows, and doors.
SE therefore who are about to build, ought to be inform'd from men thoroughly acquaint with the nature of timber, that they may know which is fit for such and such us, and which not.
In the above-mention’d chapter Vitruvius gives many other useful directions, besides what other learned men have written upon that subject.
Public-domain text (London, published by Isaac Ware, 1738). Read from the Internet Archive’s scan (gri_33125011569684) of the copy in the Getty Research Institute, by way of Wikimedia Commons, where it is marked public domain. That scan’s text layer had lost the ends of the lines on every left-hand page, so the pages were read again from the scan’s images, the two readings compared word by word, and the text cleaned: the long s (ſ) is printed s and the ct and st ligatures as plain letters, words broken at the ends of lines are joined, and running heads, page numbers, signatures and catchwords are removed. Ware’s spelling, capitals and punctuation are otherwise kept (shew, publick, antient, compleat). Chapter titles and words the OCR misread were corrected against the page images. Some misreadings will remain, most of them in the italic prefaces and the Latin of Book III. Ware’s dedication, the list of subscribers, his table of terms, the errata and the bookseller’s advertisement are not reproduced. Nor are the 212 engraved plates, their inscriptions, or the keys to the letters on them that Ware prints in the text: where Palladio writes “as in the design” the figure is in the printed book.