PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 743 
science, for science discovers while art creates. What is man 
without his shoes, his house, his clothing? Nature enables him 
to adapt what she provides, and the development of this adapta- 
tion is higher and higher refinement, and refinement is the 
threshold of all discovery. The history of architecture and 
engineering, written in the records of stone, and brick, and 
cement, from whatever part of the world we select our study, 
tells us that the advance from barbarism to civilisation was 
recorded in the building and engineering work itself just as it 
progressed. Greece has handed us down the purest examples of 
her refinement, Rome of her grasp of sanitary science in the noble 
aqueducts, and of the energy and. commercial progress of her 
people in the causeways tothe city. The Hindoo, in his temples 
of massive and solemn design, speaks of his estimate of nature 
which surrounded him. The decadence and ruin of the Roman 
Empire is shown in the almost complete loss of her architectural 
and engineering greatness, and by the long period of sem- 
barbarous rule which followed, and of the generations which came 
and went before the skilled mason again left his almost indelible 
record upon stone. Though the present teems with importance, 
in the past we have cause and effect sketched out before us in 
undeniable portraiture ; and while in the present we are creating 
further illustrations for the ages to come, we are all too slavishly 
following some of the lessons of the past, while we disregard the 
more important altogether. Almost every man is guided by the 
opinion of others. Opinion is generally a matter of education, 
and we are constantly experiencing the fact that we have to 
unlearn much, and that this is a harder process than to go from 
absolute ignorance to knowledge. There is much which we have 
to alter and adapt, and which on that account we neglect. We 
slavishly copy “styles ;” we are not free to create. Education is 
at fault here. Progress in the past shows that excellent work 
was the outcome of the increasing intelligence or knowledge of 
the people. Art was generally understood, the youth of the times 
were educated carefully, and among those nations where the 
masses of the people remained in ignorance the class of work 
produced was inferior. We have, in some measure, recognised 
the principle thus taught us in the compulsory education of 
children for a certain number of years, and we can find a modern 
instance of a nation having proved a nation of soldiers, since 
every man is trained to service for a certain number of years. 
We do not properly apply the lessons which thus surround us ; 
we copy “styles” slavishly, and disfigure our streets with 
inappropriate monuments of our wealth, and deaf to the history 
which those styles repeat to us, we do not avail ourselves of the 
methods by which those high states of architecture were reached. 
The people reared the temples and churches and cathedrals of the 
past because their religious teaching showed them that this was 
