174 
knows, there are only two other examples of Indian-corn capitals : 
those on the columns of the Playmakers’ Building, University of 
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, dating from 1850, and those on the 
porch columns of the Litchfield Mansion, Prospect Park, Brook- 
lyn, built about 1854. There are fourteen of the latter, hand 
carved in wood.° 
We are told that the ancient Egyptians tied their native plants 
to the wooden columns or posts of their primitive temples, and 
that these forms were transformed to stone as their civilization 
advanced and their art assumed a more permanent character. And 
yet here, as in the rose windows of Christian cathedrals, there 
was no slavish copying of nature—no attempt at faithful reproduc- 
tion. If a dozen Egyptian capitals were chosen at random, we 
might find no two alike; and yet, in each case, the design would 
be derived from the lotus or the papyrus. We find the acanthus 
used in a similar fashion by the Greeks, but with an endless number 
of variations and modifications. 
Apparently the “corn cob capital” did not appeal to American 
achitects as having possibilities in design, as did the papyrus and 
lotus to the Egyptians or the acanthus leaf to the Greeks. Why, 
we must leave it to the architects to answer. Possibly if the Indian 
corn (Zea Mays) had had a deep religious significance for us, 
as the lotus did for the Egyptians, we might have had a distinctive 
and possibly very effective, American order of architecture. Being 
eclectic in our religion, which was derived from the Jews, we also 
become eclectic in our architecture and drew on the Greeks. 
Plant forms in design range in size all the way from the great 
rose window of Chartres to Persian miniatures executed on so 
small a scale that a reading glass is needed to detect the beauty 
of their fine detail. And herein is a suggestion for a new source 
of design from the plant world—one which artists have scarcely 
tapped as yet, in fact, one of which many may be wholly ignorant, 
I refer to the very fine details of the structure of plant tissues and 
living substance (protoplasm) revealed only by the higher magni- 
fying powers of the compound microscope. 
Che material consists of the cross sections of roots and stems 
which show the cellular structure —_ under a still higher mag- 
’ of architecture, p. 177 of this issue 
roc 
) Pe 
» 
Notes ‘American Order 
of the Pyockivn ao inic Garden Rercorp. 
