Andrea Palladio · The First Book
Chapter V. Of Lime, and of the method of working it into mortar
THE stones of which lime is made, are either dug out of hills, or taken out of rivers:
All those taken out of hills are good where dry, brittle, free from moisture, or the mixture of any substance, which being consumed by the fire, diminishes the stone. That lime will therefore be best which is made of the most hard, solid, white tone, and which, being burnt, islesta third part lighter than the stone of which it was made.
The RE is allo a sprung sort of stone, the lime of which is very good for covering and rough-casting of walls; likewise a sealy rugged stone, taken out of the hills of Prdua, that makes an excellent lime for such buildings as are most exposed to the weather, or stand under water, because it immediately sets, grows hard, and is very lasting,
ALL stones taken out of the earth are much better to make lime of, than those which are collected; and rather taken from a shady moist pit, than from a dry one. The vhite are better than the brown, as being the most easily work'd. The pebbles found in wars and rapid streams, are excellent for lime, and make very white neat work; therefore it is chiefly used in the rough-casting of walls, All stones, either dug out of the hills or rivers, burn quicker or flower, in proportion to the fice given them, but are generally calcined in sixty hours. \When calcined, they must be wetted, in order to slack them; observing rut to pour on the water all at once, but at several times, to prevent its burning before it be well-tempered, and afterwards must be laid in a moist shady place, only covering it lightly with fund, taking cure not to mix any thing with it; and when used, the more it 35 work'd up with the find, the better it will cement; except that made of a sealy stone, like that from Padua, because that must be used as soon as it is flacked, to prevent its burning and consuming away; it will otherwise be useless.
To make mortar, lime should be mix'd with sand in this proportion; three parts of pit find to one of lime, and but two of sea or river find to one of lime.
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.