CATAGENESIS 79 



We can make our meaning plainer by comparing this cycle to an imaginary 

 cycle in the history of architecture. The buildings of primitive times would 

 necessarily be substantial, plain, and suitable to the limited wants of the people ; 

 then, as wealth increased, the architects would respond with showy structures, 

 having more ornamentation, and more complicated interiors. We will suppose 

 that they had begun to place most of their ornamentation in and upon the central 

 parts of the modern buildings, and, out of deference to inherited canons of taste, 

 had always, even in the most florid acme of their progress, adhered to this law, 

 leaving foundations primitive in style and uppermost portions always unadorned. 

 As time progressed, these structures would assume vast proportions,- and would be 

 built in ever increasing numbers, until at last the nation, having outgrown its 

 strength, would begin to decline. The vast buildings would have to be aban- 

 doned, and smaller habitations would arise, in answer to the requirements of a 

 poorer population. The architects, faithful to their inherited canons, but forced 

 into simplicity, would gradually follow the decline, and record it in the structures 

 of the decadence. They would effect this, we will suppose, by reducing the 

 ornamentation from above downwards, thus gradually doing away with the cen- 

 tral band of ornamentation, and also by actually lessening the height and other- 

 wise contracting the bulk of the buildings. Primitive simplicity would thus be 

 restored, but strong traces would still be left in the style and construction of the 

 buildings of their having been adapted, by a process of reduction, from a pre- 

 viously existing period of greater size and complexity in structure. It would 

 be possible to read in the style of the decadence, that all the buildings had 

 come from primitive forms through the medium of a progressive period, during 

 which the central stories had undergone the greatest modifications. This would 

 be traceable in many surviving peculiarities of the modes of laj'ing the courses of 

 stone, the cutting and more elegant shaping of the interiors, etc. It would, how- 

 ever, be equally plain that the architecture of the upper stories had always been 

 more or less degenerate, and also that their degenerate forms had replaced the 

 progressive ornamentation and forms of the central parts of buildings during the 

 decadence of the nation. 



This would quite accurately represent the reversion of the forms we have 

 been tracing, so far as the purely retrogressive series were concerned. We 

 can understand their structural degeneration and their positions as the latest 

 evolved forms of each series upon the same grounds, since they would neces- 

 sarily stand at the termini of the series. Their degenerate characters could not 

 be said, perhaps, to have been inheritable, any more than the architecture of the 

 buildings alluded to above, but a tendency to degeneration caused by the un- 

 favorable surroundings would have to be assumed. Each generation in succes- 

 sion, acted upon by this tendency, like the successive buildings of the decadence, 

 would arrive earlier at a stage when senile characters would replace the progres- 

 sive characters of the adult period. The geratologous characters are, however, 

 in greater or less degree, reversions due to the loss of the progressive characters 

 of the adult; and this is equally true when the characters of geratologous species 

 are compared with those of the simple, generalized radical species from which 



