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1. PROTECTION from the inclemency of the seasons was the ancestor of architecture. Of little account at its birth, it rose into light and life with the civilisation of mankind; and, proportionately as security, peace, and good order were established, it became, not less than its sisters, painting and sculpture, one method of transmitting to posterity the degree of importance to which a nation had attained, and the moral value of that nation amongst the kingdoms of the earth. If the art, however, be considered strictly in respect of its actual utility, its principles are restricted within very narrow limits; for the mere art, or rather science, of construction, has no title to a place among the fine arts. Such is in various degrees to be found among people of savage and uncivilised habits; and until it is brought into a system founded upon certain laws of proportion, and upon rules based on a refined analysis of what is suitable in the highest degree to the end proposed, it can pretend to no rank of a high class. It is only when a nation has arrived at a certain degree of opulence and luxury that architecture can be said to exist in it. Hence it is that architecture, in its origin, took the varied forms which have impressed it with such singular differences in different countries; differences which, though modified as each country advanced in civilisation, were, in each, so stamped, that the type was permanent, being refined only in a higher degree in their most important examples.

2. The ages that have elapsed, and the distance by which we are separated from the nations among whom the art was first practised, deprive us of the means of examining the shades of difference resulting from climate, productions of the soil, the precise spots upon which the earliest societies of man were fixed, with their origin, number, mode of life, and social institutions; all of which influenced them in the selection of one form in preference to another. We may, however, easily trace in the architecture of nations, the types of three distinct states of life, which are clearly discoverable at the present time; though in some cases the types may be thought doubtful.

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SECT. 11.

ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF BUILDING.

3. The original classes into which mankind were divided were, we may safely assa those of hunters, of shepherds, and of those occupied in agriculture; and the buildings protection which each would require, must have been characterised by their several or pations. The hunter and fisher found all the accommodation they required in the c

and caverns of rocks; and the indole: 1 which those states of life induced, ma them insensible or indifferent to grea comfort than such naturally-formed bitations afforded. We are certain t thus lived such tribes. Jeremiah ( xlix. 16.), speaking of the judg upon Edom, says, "O thou that dwe in the clefts of the rock, that holdest height of the hill;" a text which of... has received ample illustration from: vellers, and especially from the laboury Messrs. Leon de Laborde and Linant the splendid engravings of the ruins Petra (fig. 1.). To the shepherd, inhabitant of the plains wandering f-one spot to another, as pasture beca inadequate to the support of his toess another species of dwelling was more propriate; one which he could rem with him in his wanderings: this was tent, the type of the architecture China, whose people were, like all t Tartar races, nomades or scenites, that a shepherds or dwellers in tents. Where portion of the race fixed its abode ir the purposes of agriculture, a very ferent species of dwelling was necessary. Solidity was required as well for the person comfort of the husbandman as for preserving, from one season to another, the fruits of t earth, upon which he and his family were to exist. Hence, doubtless, the hut, which m authors have assumed to be the type of Grecian architecture.

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Fig. 1.

RUINS OF PETRA,

4. Authors, says the writer in the Encyc. Methodique, in their search after the origin architecture, have generally confined their views to a single type, without considering t modification which would be necessary for a mixture of two or more of the states of manki. for it is evident that any two or three of them may co-exist, a point upon which more = be said in speaking of Egyptian architecture. Hence have arisen the most discordant = contradictory systems, formed without sufficient acquaintance with the customs of differe people, their origin, and first state of existence.

5. The earliest habitations which were constructed after the dispersion of mankind frum the plains of Sennaar (for there, certainly, as we shall hereafter see, even without the eviden of Scripture, was a great multitude gathered together), were, of course, proportioned the means which the spot afforded, and to the nature of the climate to which they were to adapted. Reeds, canes, the branches, bark, and leaves of trees, clay, and similar mater would be first used. The first houses of the Egyptians and of the people of Palestine w of reeds and canes interwoven. At the present day the same materials serve to form t houses of the Peruvians. According to Pliny (1. vii.), the first houses of the Greeks weonly of clay; for it was a considerable time before that nation was acquainted with z process of hardening it into bricks. The Abyssinians still build with clay and ree Wood, however, offers such facilities of construction, that still, as of old, where it abours its adoption prevails. At first, the natural order seems to be that which Vitrus.. describes in the first chapter of his second book. "The first attempt," says our auth "was the mere erection of a few spars, united together with twigs, and covered with mu Others built their walls of dried lumps of turf, connected these walls together by means timbers laid across horizontally, and covered the erections with reeds and boughs, for purpose of sheltering themselves from the inclemency of the seasons. Finding, howe that flat coverings of this sort would not effectually shelter them in the winter season, tr made their roofs of two inclined planes, meeting each other in a ridge at the summit. whole of which they covered with clay, and thus carried off the rain." The same aut

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