186 
THE SCIENTIST. 
The Development of the Column. 
[Proceedin^-s of the Kansas City Academy 
of Science.! 
Bv Cha8. W. Dawson. 
I promised you a paper upon 
primitive and early architecture. 
Perhaps one of the most useful 
and ornamental features of architec- 
tural design is the cohimn, and I 
hope I may interest you to some ex- 
tent in its early history. 
Probably the hrst habitations 
worth mentioning that were built by 
mankind, were constructed of young 
trees, their butts thrust into the 
ground around a circle, with the tops 
drawn in and bound together. The 
spaces between tlie ribs thus formed 
were interlaced with boughs, ruslies, 
or some suitable material; these 
again being daubed with mud. As 
soon as primitive man had fashioned 
instruments with which lie was able 
to hack down larger tites and to 
roughly dress them, he l)egan build- 
ing houses of rectangular form, with 
thatched roofs. As his ideas and 
ability increased he enlarged upon 
this scheme, projecting his roof in 
front of his house to form a covered 
space, and Avithin his house widened 
the distance from wall to w^all. In 
either case the roof needed some ex- 
tra sup})orts, and these he made by 
placing a forked tree beneath the 
log used for a rafter. Tiie next ad- 
vance was a rough decoration of this 
column made by hewing the shaft 
and the forking branches into a more 
detinite form, with possildy some 
rude carving upon the lower side of 
the forks. 
We have taken as an hypothesis 
that our primitive man was a dweller 
among forests; but what did he do 
where he had no trees, or, as was 
the case with the Egyptians, very 
few? Having marked out the plan 
of his house, the Egyptian bound 
together bundles of reeds or lotus 
w^ith bands of by bins. Placing a 
large bundle at each external angle 
of the house, a smaller one was 
placed at each internal angle. These 
were held in a vertical position by 
stays, and fastened together with 
ties of byblus. At short intervals 
^till smaller bundles were placed op- 
posite each other along the inside 
and outside lines of the future wall. 
Across the tops of those smaller 
columns on the outside line of the 
wall, other bundles were laid hori- 
zontally butting against and bound 
to the top of the main columns at 
the corners. The walls were now 
filled in with sunburned brick and 
tempered clay. It is probable that 
at some time the Egyptians, as well 
as other early peoples, built columns 
of small stones and of bricks. In 
either case the column would need 
some sort of Hat plate placed upon 
the top of it to distribute the superim- 
posed load through all parts of its 
upper surface. 
These are the three most impor- 
tant primitive forms, and in each 
of these three we can watch a 
gradual development into a distinc- 
tive style. 
