190 



drawings consists of maps, plans, views, portraits, armorial beaiinga, 

 and miscellaneous subjects, relating to the history of the County of 

 Lancaster. The formation of the collection occupied Mr. Binns 

 upwards of forty years, and it consists of more than six thousand 

 illustrations. 



Mr. T. Sansom laid on the table for distribution Jiving specimens of 

 Asplenium marinum, Lin. from Bromborough. 



Mr. Samuel Huggins read a paper entitled 



ARCHITECTURE AND NATURE. 



In introducing the subject, he observed that a broad distinction 

 existed between the study of nature by the architect, and that reference 

 to nature which was involved in pictorial and sculptural sit. By the 

 painter apd the sculptor natural forms were directly imitated as the 

 vehicle of character or of pathos ; while the architect's imitation was 

 analogical and abstract. 



The fii*st office of architecture, (which was both an art and a science,) 

 and the basis of all decorative design, was to construct : and, looking 

 around us in the world, we found that nature, who evermore worked on 

 unerring principles, was also a constructor, — that she reared edifices of 

 every *variety of form, size, and character, organic and inorganic, and 

 that creative design might be traced throughout her entire realm. We 

 had therefore a grand model, an unfailing fountain of all mechanical 

 and aesthetic law, from the observance of which flowed wisdom of 

 construction and beauty of form in every system and style of design. 

 It would perhaps be said that these laws must be limited in their aj^li- 

 cation, and that the teaching of nature available to the architect must 

 be irecessarily scant and meagre, seeing how different in their purpose 

 were her works from ours ; but nature's code consisted of broad prin- 

 ciples, from which man's' intelligence must educe laws. Architecture, 

 he went on to prove, was based on external nature and the powers, 

 physical and mental, of man — as much on external nature as consisted 

 with the due exercise of the human intellect, and was an intellectual 

 rendering of the forms around us. Nature, in the material universe, 

 presented us with no literal model ; but she gave us principles of 

 construction for observance in the erection of our edifices, which were 

 therefore built as nature would build them for the same purpose. We 

 gathered how she "would" build ours by observing how she did build her 

 own. For example, we required pillars of support — columns, which 

 had ever been, in almost all styles of art hitherto practiced, the most 



