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6 HISTORY OF INDIAN ARCHITECTURE. have an opportunity of seeing what perfect buildings the uneducated natives of India produce, will easily understand how success may be achieved, while those who observe what failures the best educated and most talented architects in Europe frequently perpetrate, may, by a study of Indian models, easily see why this must inevitably be the result. It is only in India that the two systems can be seen practised side by side the educated and intellectual European failing because his principles are wrong, the feeble and uneducated native as inevitably succeeding because his principles are right. The Indian builders think only of what they are doing, and how they can best produce the effect they desire. In the European system it is considered more essential that a building, especially in its details, should be a correct copy of something else, than good in itself or appropriate to its purpose : hence the difference in the result. In one other respect India affords a singularly favourable field to the student of architecture. In no other country of the same extent are there so many distinct nationalities, each retain- ing its old belief and its old feelings, and impressing these on its art. There is consequently no country where the outlines of ethnology as applied to art can be so easily perceived, or their application to the elucidation of the various problems so pre- eminently important. The mode in which the art has been practised in Europe for the last three centuries has been very confusing. In India it is clear and intelligible. No one can look at the subject without seeing its importance, and no one can study the art as practised there without recognising what the principles of the science really are. In addition, however, to these scientific advantages, it will undoubtedly be conceded by those who are familiar with the subject that for certain qualities the Indian buildings are un- rivalled. They display an exuberance of fancy, a lavishness of labour, and an elaboration of detail to be found nowhere else. They may contain nothing so sublime as the hall at Karnak, nothing so intellectual as the Parthenon, nor so constructively grand as a mediaeval cathedral ; but for certain other qualities not perhaps of the highest kind, yet very important in architectural art the Indian buildings stand alone. They consequently fill up a great gap in our knowledge of the subject, which without them would remain a void. HISTORV. One of the greatest difficulties that exist perhaps the greatest in exciting an interest in Indian antiquities arises