656 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION H. 
RURAL CHURCHES. 
By A. Norra, F.R.V.LA. 
By nature, man is a copyist rather than an inventor, and 
in no science has he shown greater aptitude for imitation 
than in architecture. 
The most pronounced and typical features which have 
tended to give fixity to any recognised architecture style, 
when traced to their original source, are found to be but 
the crude attempts of a copyist to reproduce a _ petrified 
repetition of more primitive modes of construction, or those 
natural features which were most intimately associated 
with the every-day wants of his existence. 
Should we desire to verify the truth of this assumption, 
it will be necessary to search among the mists of a hoary 
antiquity. We must, in fact, go to the cradle of our 
civilisation both in time and place, for the dawns of civilisa-. 
tion and architecture are contemporaneous. 
Since that time architecture has passed through many 
phases. It has successively adapted itself to the conditions 
of many forms of civilisation, to many diverse religious 
systems, and to the requirements of many extreme climates ; 
but change from one type to another was slow, and almost 
imperceptible. 
Little by little, one generation added to the knowledge 
possessed by its fathers, but always building on the 
foundation already laid. Sometimes, it 1s true, progress 
wasmore rapid than at others, and it must also be admitted, 
that like the progress of evolution in nature, there appeared 
those unavoidable periods of stagnation, and even retrogres- 
sion. 
We call those return waves by names which are synony- 
mous to decline and decay, but they were in reality breath- 
ing spaces during which architecture stored up new vigour 
and vitality which enabled it to soar to heights never 
attained by any previous type. 
Individual man seldom travelled far on any given path 
of progress. An original mind might initiate the transition 
to a new style, but the fixity and development of the type 
would be left for other men to perpetuate and embellish. 
As civilisation spread, architectural culture was neces- 
sarily carried to climes dissimilar to those which had 
evolved the transported type; yet history teaches us that 
many generations of men lived and died before that exotic 
architecture breathed in sympathy with its new environ- 
ments. 
