APPENDIX. 211 that the Ionic is Egypto-Assyrian. Their power is in this — that they were never " designed," but developed slowly from a far ancestry. The essence of Greek art is not in these mere shapes accidentally derived, but in the spirit of clearness, order, and exquisiteness in which they were dealt with. The normal course of architectural development has been through need, local possibilities, experiment — that is the period of infancy : to custom, mastery, expansion, and maturity : into rules, and then intentional variations, redundance, sestheticism, incoherence, and decline. While Greek " sanctioned architecture," the ideal of Vitruvius, was declining, the Roman building art arose. Later architecture was again and again renewed in Byzantine, Romanesque, and mediaeval building adventure, as in modern days it is being renewed outside the realm of "taste" by fresh needs and engineering experiment — the basis of the architecture of to- morrow. My study of the old has had for its object the discovery of the conditions of the new. " Nothing comes of its own accord to men, but all things by experiment." *
- Herodotus.
Fig. 217.— Fragment of Slab with Lattice Pattern, from Athens, in South Kensington Museum. Printed at The Dakien Press, Edittburgh. R
