Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/876

840 P U R F U R the every-day life of his times, and has been reprinted in 1855 under the editorship of Ed. Fournier and Ch. Asse- lineau. The Furetenana, which appeared in Paris eight years after Furetiere s death, is a collection of but little value. FURIES (FuRi.*, also called DIR.E) are not native to Latin mythology, but adopted and modified from the Greek Erinyes (see ERINYES). Originally denoting the avenging power exerted by nature against all transgressors of its regular order, and spoken of by older poets (Homer, /Eschylus, &c.) either simply in the singular or in the plural as an indefinite number, the Erinyes assumed later a more rigid and methodical form, As the conception of a future life grew, they were invested with the duty of punishing sinners, and were settled in Tartarus (Virgil, jEn. vi.) ; their number was fixed down to the sacred three (a number mentioned so early as Eurip., Orestes), and indi vidual names, Allecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera, occur first in the Alexandrian poets and are adopted in Latin. But besides this, Virgil, and the later poets in imitation of him, frequently employ the Furiaj in another way which is also suggested by a Greek original. The Erinyes are said to madden the transgressor and lead him into further crimes which work their own punishment (II. xix. 87 ; Od. xv. 234) ; and ^Eschylus by a strong metaphor calls Helen an Erinys, as it were, a scourge of men (A yam. 729). Virgil develops this thought so as to make the Fume the agents employed by the higher gods to stir up all mischief and strife and hatred on the earth. They sit close by the throne of Jupiter, ready to execute his errands of ill (^En. xii.); Allecto is sent by Juno to raise the war against /Eneas (so also Ovid, Met. iv. 473; Statius, Tfteb. i., &c.); they are the pronubce of an unhappy marriage (Lucan, viii. 90). Without regard to ethical propriety, they are employed as a convenient poetic machinery. The free, fluid conception of the Greek myth, hiding in it the deepest truth and capable of infinite growth, was in this case, as so often among the Latins, either hardened into a stiff, lifeless morality, or altered into a fanciful device to suit a capricious and arbitrary system of divine action. There are also some relics of an ancient Italian conception akin to the Erinys. Goddesses named Furiiue were powerful in the underworld; they had their own flamen Furinalis, their festival Furi- nalia on July 25th, their grove across the Tiber, where C. Gracchus was slain. Like Erinys the word is used both in singular and in plural; and both Furina (root bhur) and Erinys (root sar) mean " the rapidly moving " (see Kuhn in Zeitschrift, i.). At a very early period this genuine native idea disappeared before the Grecizing tendency, and was in the time of Varro almost forgotten (Varro, L.L. vi. 19). For the artistic representation see Bb ttiger, Furicnmaske. FURNACE. Under this name are included all con trivances for the production and utilization of heat by the combustion of fuel. The word is common to all the Romance tongues, appear ing in more or less modified forms of the Latin fornax. But in all those languages the word has a more extended meaning than in English, as it covers every variety of heating apparatus; while here, in addition to furnaces proper, we distinguish other varieties as ovens, stoves, and kilns. The first of these, in the form Ofen, is used in German as a general term like the French four ; but in English it has been restricted to those apparatus in which only a moderate temperature, usually below a red heat, is produced in a close chamber. Our bakers ovens, hot-air ovens or stoves, annealing ovens for glass or metal, <fec., would all be called fours in French and Off en in German, in common with furnaces of all kinds. Stove, an equi- va cnt of oven, is from ths German Stule, i.e., a heated room, and is commonly so understood; but is also applied o open fire-places, which appears to be somewhat of a departure from the original signification. Furnaces are constructed according to many different patterns with varying degrees of complexity in arrange ment ; but all may be considered as combining three essen tial parts, namely, the fire-place in which the fuel is con- umed, the heated chamber, laboratory, hearth, or working bed, as it is variously called, where the heat is applied to the special work for which the furnace is designed, and the ap paratus for producing rapid combustion by the supply of air under pressure to the fire. In the simplest cases, the functions of two or more of these parts may be combined into one, as in the smith s forge, where the lire-place and heating chamber are united, the iron being placed among the coals, only the air for burning being supplied under pressure from a blowing engine by a second special con trivance, the tuyere, tuiron, twycr, or blast pipe ; but in the more refined modern furnaces, where great economy of fuel is an object, the different functions are distributed over separate and distinct apparatus, the fuel being con verted into gas in one, dried in another, and heated in a third, before arriving at the point of combustion in the working chamber of the furnace proper. The most obvious distinction that can be used in the classification of furnaces is founded on the method adopted for supplying air, which may either be blown into the fire, under a pressure above that of the atmosphere sufficient to overcome the resistance presented by the packed columns of fuel and other materials to its free passage, or be drawn through it by a partial vacuum in a chimney formed by the heated gases on their way to the atmosphere. The former are known as blast furnaces, and the latter as chimney draught, air, or wind furnaces. Stack and Blast Furnaces. The blast furnace in its simplest form is among the oldest, if not the oldest, of metallurgical contrivances. In the old copper smelting district of Arabia Petrcea, clay blast pipes dating back to the earlier dynasties of the ancient empire of Egypt have been found in great numbers, buried in slag heaps; and in India the native smiths and iron workers continue to the present day the use of furnaces of similar primitive types. These, when reduced to their most simple expression, are mere basin-shaped hollows in the ground, containing ignited charcoal and the substances to be heated, the fire being urged by a blast of air blown in through one or more nozzles from a bellows at or near the top. This class of furnace is usually known as an open fire or hearth, and is represented in a more advanced stage of development by the Catalan, German, and Walloon forges formerly used in the production of malleable iron, and still current to some extent in Sweden, Corsica, and a few places in central Europe. Figs. 1 and 2 represent a Catalan forge in use a few years since at Mont- gaillard, in Ariege, then one of the few localities in which the process survived. It is now probably com pletely abandoned. In all of these the parts are essentially the same: the cavity in the ground is represented by a pit of square or rectangular sec tion lined with brick or stone of a kind not readily acted on by heat, about H or 2 feet deep, usually some what larger above than below, with a tuyere or blast pipe of copper penetrating one of the walls near the top, with a considerable downward inclination, so that the air meets FIG. 1. Elevation of Catalan Forge.