772 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in Devonshire, where they are known as a " good pair of shoes/' 

 because they protect the feet, or lower part of the wall. In the 

 remains of the Temple of Viracocha in Peru the mud walls have a 

 stone base eight feet in height. With these examples before us, 

 and understanding the necessary purposes they served, we may 

 assume that such protective substructures were generally em- 

 ployed wherever this particular manner of building was in use. 

 It is highly probable that in this rude constructive detail we have 

 the first origin of that part of the architecture in the palaces of 

 Assyria to which the great winged bulls in the British Museum 

 belonged. It seems now to be accepted that these palaces were 

 constructed of crude brick, or at least this material was the princi- 

 pal one employed; baked or perhaps glazed brick may have been 

 used in the exterior of the walls, but the interior was of sun-dried 

 brick, and covered with stucco. This latter part is exactly what I 

 saw in Persia. Along the base of these walls slabs of marble were 

 placed, varying from three to about eight feet in height. These 

 were generally sculptured, and the great bulls were represented 

 on the portions of the slabs on each side of the doors. The 

 development of this highly ornamental dado in the palace, from 

 the base of the mud wall, is not a difficult problem to solve. The 

 foundations I saw in the villages were formed of stones, half- 

 bricks, or rubbish of any kind. In the better class of houses 

 a more regular construction would be followed ; and in palaces 

 the covering of this with marble is what might be expected. I 

 accompanied a visit of ceremony to the palace of one of the 

 Shah's sons in Tehran, and I noticed that, in the room where we 

 were received, slabs of alabaster, about three feet in height, 

 went all round the base of the walls. These alabaster slabs in 

 Persia are the counterpart of the marbles in the palaces of As- 

 syria. In both cases they served the same purpose they pro- 

 tected the lower part of the walls. 



It was a source of some surprise to me to find that the Per- 

 sian villages were, as a rule, exactly similar to those I had seen 

 in the Khyber Pass and other parts of Afghanistan. They are 

 square, formed with four high crenelated walls, and a round 

 tower at each corner. The gateway is in the center of one of 

 the walls, and the mud houses are huddled together inside, one 

 might say, " anyhow." Larger villages may have six or eight 

 towers ; small towns or large ones have more wall and a larger 

 number of towers. One of the first things that drew my atten- 

 tion to mud as a building material in Persia was, when in pass- 

 ing a small town one morning on the march, I saw some men 

 either building or repairing the walls and towers of the place. 

 It then struck me that these defensive walls were, with only 

 some trifling details of difference, almost identical with the walls 



