412* POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 



IX. ARCHITECT. 

 By HEEBERT SPENCER. 



BUILDING of the kind dignified by the name architecture, 

 can not exist during early stages of social development. 

 Before the production of such building there must be an advance 

 in mechanical arts greater than savages of low type have made 

 greater than we find among the slightly civilized. 



It is true that constructions of unhewn stones arranged upon 

 the surface into some order, as well as rude underground stone 

 chambers, have been left by prehistoric peoples, and that incipient 

 architecture is exhibited in them. If we extend the conception to 

 take in these, however, we may remark as significant, that the art 

 was first used either for preservation of the dead or as ancillary 

 to ceremonies in honor of the apotheosized dead. In either case 

 the implication is that architecture in these simple beginnings 

 fulfilled the ideas of the primitive medicine-men or priests. Some 

 director there must have been; and we can scarcely help con- 

 cluding that he was at once the specially skillful man and the 

 man who was supposed to be in communication with the departed 

 spirits to be honored. 



But now, saying nothing more of this vague evidence, let us 

 pass to evidence furnished by those semi-civilized and civilized 

 peoples who have left remains and records. 



We are at once met by the broad fact, parallel to the fact im- 

 plied above, that the earliest architecture bequeathed by ancient 

 nations was an outcome of ancestor-worship. Its first phases were 

 exhibited in either tombs or temples, which, as we have long ago 

 seen, are the less developed and more developed forms of the same 

 thing. Hence, as being both appliances for worship, now simple 

 and now elaborate, both came under the control of the priest- 

 hood ; and the inference to be drawn is that the first architects 

 were priests. 



An illustration which may be put first is yielded by Ancient 

 India. Says Manning: "Architecture was treated as a sacred 

 science by learned Hindus." Again we read in Hunter 



'' Indian architecture, although also ranked as an xqoa-veda or supple- 

 mentary part of inspired learning, derived its development from Buddhist 

 rather than from Brahmanical impulses." 



In Tennent's Ceylon there are passages variously exhibiting the 

 relations between architecture and religion and its ministers. By 

 many peoples the cave was made the primitive tomb-temple ; and 



