348 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as did the Crusades in the middle ages, the revival of Greek and 

 Latin studies in the Renascence, and the Mussulman conquest in 

 India. 



It is also to be remarked that as art in a general way reflects 

 certain wants and corresponds with certain sentiments, it is des- 

 tined to share their fate, and therefore to vanish when they cease 

 to be vital ; but that condition is no sign of a decay of civilization. 

 At no period has civilization been as high as now, and at none 

 has art been more commonplace. From a spontaneous outgrowth 

 of the devotion of the past it has become an accessory, a thing of 

 luxury and convention, imitative rather than original. No people 

 of the present has a national art, but all are contented with copies 

 of the models of past ages. 



If we study the shapes in which architecture, for instance, has 

 been transmitted from one people to another since its historical 

 beginning with the Egyptians, we shall find that in the hands of 

 an inferior race — the Ethiopians, who, although they had centuries 

 to work in, were deficient in cerebral capacity — it tended to inferior 

 forms ; while with the Greeks, a higher race, whose development 

 also occupied several hundred years, it was improved upon and 

 raised to a much higher level. The Persians, an inferior people 

 to the Greeks, and whose ^independent career was much shorter, 

 displayed considerable talent for adaptation, and were beginning 

 to work a transformation in their art, when they were overthrown. 

 A thousand years later they rose again, and devised an architec- 

 ture having the stamp of originality, but combined with it marks 

 of the influence of the ancient art and of the more recent Arabian 

 art. 



Another more modern school of architecture, of which speci- 

 mens are yet standing, strikingly illustrates the extent to which 

 a race modifies the arts which it adopts. The example is all the 

 more typical because it is drawn from a group of peoples profess- 

 ing the same religion but having different origins. I mean the 

 Mussulmans, whose structures in Spain, Africa, Syria, Persia, and 

 India present so considerable differences that it is impossible to 

 arrange them in one class as we do the different styles of the 

 Gothic. The correctness of this illustration is enforced by a refer- 

 ence to India, where, although the same religions and the same 

 rule prevail throughout the land, the temple in the north and the 

 pagoda in the south, consecrated to the same divinity, are as dif- 

 ferent from each other as a Grecian temple and a Gothic cathedral. 

 This great peninsula furnishes the most suggestive and the most 

 philosophical of historical books. It is now, in fact, the single 

 country in which we can, by simple changes of place, transfer our- 

 selves at will into different periods of time and observe still in life 

 the series of successive stages which mankind has had to pass 



