a headed peg of metal to be driven through pieces of wood or other material to hold them together. A very large nail is a spike; a very small nail is a brad or tack. Iron is the material used ordinarily, although brass and copper, rarely gold and silver, are employed for decorative purposes. Nails are used principally in putting up wooden buildings, fences, and the like, but they play an important part also in the making of boxes, trunks, picture frames, and many other articles. They are used in upholstering, horseshoeing, coopering, and many other trades. A hammer and a box of nails are considered a necessity in every household. In 1890 the production of nails in the United States alone reached the enormous value of $34,227,517, though the demand fell off in ten years to half that sum. The manufacture centers in New England. Taunton is the center of the tack trade. Birmingham is the great center of the English trade. Among the ancients nails were precious articles. They were made, of course, by hand. In the early trade with the African tribes and the South Sea Islanders a few nails ranked in purchasing power with a hand mirror or string of beads. Hand-made nails, or wrought nails, are forged, one by one, from nail-rods turned out by the rolling mills. The best horseshoe nails are made still by hand. Machinery for making cut nails was invented by Ezekiel Reed of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, as early as 1786. A patent was granted an English inventor about the same time. In making cut nails the iron is first rolled into ribbons or strips of suitable width and thickness. As the strip is fed through a machine, the nails are sheared crosswise from the end of the slip. As each nail falls off it is caught by the neck in a slit. A blow from a heavy hammer-like die forms the head. The finished nail then slides along a trough into a keg set ready to receive it. In order to secure a taper, the shear is set obliquely. The head or wide end of the first nail is taken from one edge of the strip; the head of the next nail from the other edge, etc. A machine cuts from 10 to 1,000 nails a minute, according to size. Wire nails are a French invention. They were popular in England before they were introduced into the United States. They were made at first by cutting wire into lengths. One end was pointed on an anvil. The wire was then held in a vise, while a head was formed by a few taps of a hammer. Their manufacture was begun in the United States in 1850. They attracted general attention at the Centennial Exposition in 1876, and have since driven cut nails almost out of the market. Steel wire is fed into the American nail machine from a huge spool. A pair of V-shaped pliers cuts the wire into nail lengths, leaving one end square and pinching the other to a point. A trip hammer forms the head. The nails are polished by tumbling about in a drum and striking on each other. They run through spouts into 100-pound kegs. A wire nail machine makes about 500 three-penny nails a minute. Spikes are turned out at the rate of one a second. In the large factories many machines run side by side. There are over 300 styles and sizes of nails in the trade. The word penny used in connection with the size of nails means pound. A six-penny nails weighs six pounds to the thousand nails, etc. When a nail has been driven through, and the point bent over and driven down so that the nail cannot be pulled out, then it is said to be clenched or clinched,--whence the popular expression "to hammer home an argument, and clinch it." "To hit the nail on the head," is another popular saying for which we are indebted to the driver of nails.