The Evolution of Architecture. 325 



The shaping force of the environment determined the kind 

 of habitation ; with wood abundant there was the wooden 

 hut ; with wood scarce and stone abundant, the hut of stone ; 

 where wood and stone alike were scarce, the skins of beasts 

 stretched upon poles furnished the primitive tent. Survival 

 is a proof of evolution second to no other. Thoreau's trout 

 in the milk is not better circumstantial evidence of it. Now 

 that we have in the temples of Egypt, if not of Greece, the 

 stone hut or cave magnified and improved, in the structures 

 of India and ^ei^ia>he wooden hut enlarged and glorified, 

 there can be no^oubt ; but it is the architecture of the pago- 

 da and the mosque that most obviously tells the story of its 

 origin ; one sees the tent in them with half an eye. The 

 Lycian tomb in the British Museum is an object-lesson of 

 remarkable significance. Built of stone, its whole construc- 

 tion is a reminiscence of the carpenter. That the temples of 

 Greece are reminiscential in the same way I may not dare to 

 say, because two such eminent authorities as Viollet le Due 

 and Dr. Franz von Eeber are of opposite opinions, each 

 absolutely sure that he is right. I must confess that Eeber, 

 contending that the stone-work of the Greeks was but a 

 modified carpentry, appears to me to make out his case 

 much better than Le Due. 



The earliest architecture, properly so called, with which 

 we are acquainted is that of Egypt, and this is far removed 

 from any of the rude beginnings of mankind. The oldest 

 buildings stand upon the youngest earth, the alluvial deposits 

 of the Nile. Chaldea may have preceded Egypt with a 

 splendid architecture, but she built of sun-dried bricks 

 where Egypt built of stone, and offered premiums on oblivion 

 by that method, the only one at her command. By what 

 steps of strength and beauty Egypt climbed to that plateau 

 of architectural splendor on which we find her sitting proudly 

 at the dawn of history five thousand years ago it is not given 

 us to know. If we could believe that any architecture was 

 a revelation of the Infinite Beauty and had no progressive 

 development from less to greater things, we should believe it 

 of the architecture of Egypt, not only because we find none 

 of the steps that led to it, but because from the period of 

 our first acquaintance with it it reveals so little change. "With 

 such immobility preceding the oldest monuments as we have 

 succeeding them, no time seems long enough to have devel- 

 oped the architecture of those monuments. There must 

 have been a time when every present did not slavishly repro- 



