foundation bolt

A bolt which keeps a bedplate-of an engine, for instance-down to its substructure. foundation-muslin, s. Fabric : An open-worked, gummed fabric, used for stiffening dre es and bonnets. foundation-pile, s. Hydr. Eng.: A pile driven into soft or treacherous ground to form, with others, an unyielding basis for a structure. foundation-sacrifice, s. Comp. Mythol.: A sacrifice common to races of low culture, who sought to render buildings firm and stable by drenching the foundation-stones with blood, by burying a human victim beneath them, or by immuring some unfortunate wretch in the structure itself. Tradition a erts that such sacri fices were practiced in the Middle Ages in some form or other, at the castle of Lie ben stein in Thu ring i a, at the walls of Copenhagen, and at Scutari, and Tylor states that so late as 1843, when a new bridge ple that a child was wanted to be built into the was built at Halle, a notion was abroad among peofoundations. The idea underlying these sacrifices was the propitiation of evil spirits, or an endeavor to render them, in some sort, guardians of the structure. Hugh Miller (in his My Schools and Schoolmasters , ch. xi.), relates a conversation he had with a herd-boy on the subject of ghosts. The boy said: "It's the spirit of the man who was killed on the foundation-stone, just after it was laid, and then built into the wa' by the masons, that he might keep the castle by coming back again; and they're saying that a' the verra ra ould houses in the kintra had murdered men builded intil them in that way, and that they have a' o' them their bogle." The buccaneers of the Spanish Main are said to have killed and buried a negro or a Spaniard with their treasures, that bis spirit might haunt the spot and drive away intruders. In this case, of course, the dominant idea was that of guardianship. There seems to be an allusion to some such rite in the founder book of Joshua. "He shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it" (vi. 26). The custom still lingers in some parts of Asia and Africa, and in Polynesia and Borneo. "More cultured nations of Southern Asia have carried on into modern ages the rite of foundation - sacrifice ."Tulor: Primitive Culture, i. 97.