is, built up of thin beds, like leaves in a book,
having fragments of mica in planes parallel to
such beds. Some limestones, such as the shelly,
are also more or less laminated. There are
flags, slates, and slaty rocks, also used as
building-stones.

Modern architects have committed many
errors in the use of building-stones by idly or
blindly following precedent in general design
and detail. The beautiful temples of Greece
were carved out of the finest material for such
a purpose—Parian marble—that the world
can produce; the fine grain and uniform
texture allowing the embodiment of exquisite
mouldings. We moderns also admire the
semi-transparent substance and brilliant colour,
though some of the German architects declare
that the Greeks only used marble because it
readily took paint and colour. This may or
may not be so. A Greek temple in its entire
state was as perfect a building as ever came
from the brain and hands of man. Since Stuart's
and Revit's time, architects have blundered
on, vainly trying with coarse-grained sandstones
to imitate the forms and details executed
in the fine-grained marble of Greece.  Greek
architecture, or rather the proportions of Greek
architecture, as embodied in sandstone and
stucco in Scotland and in England, is a hideous
mistake; it is vulgar, staring, out of place, out
of proportion, and out of keeping.

Renaissance architecture is better fitted to be
executed in sandstones and limestones than the
more subtle and refined Greek forms and details.
But this is a style full of absurdities.
Stones are rusticked, distorted, cut,
carved, and set in every form and way in which
stone ought not to be used. A rustic does
not necessarily give strength, but frequently
weakens the stone by the amount of chamfer,
or sinking, removed. Look at Whitehall Chapel,
at St. Paul's, at the War Office and Admiralty,
or at any similar structure—Somerset House, for
instance—and the stones will be found split and
spalched, on bed, face, and joint. There are
columns with nothing to carry, drip mouldings
and pediments beneath porticoes and even within,
sham porticoes, and sham jointing.

Norman architecture, in its simplicity and
massiveness, is well suited to be executed in
our sandstones and limestones; and so-called
Gothic architecture, in its plain and simple
garb, harmonises perfectly with our climate,
our habits, and our building-stone. Let our
architects work in the honest and homely style
of the best early Gothic architects, and we may
have a national style of architecture suited to
the building-stones of the country and to the
climate.  We must remember that our
forefathers had neither the facilities to obtain the
best material nor the wealth to pay for working
it: so that we ought not to take some type of
buildings, beautiful in plan and outline, but
rude in material and workmanship, and then,
with better material and means to procure
better workmanship, imitate these defects. This
is only aping the blunder of the Chinese tailor,
who, when he made a new coat from an old
pattern, took care to reproduce the holes, frays,
and patches, so that the bewildered owner could
not distinguish the old from new garment. In
many of our modern churches, we have exactly
this type of architecture. Have modern
architects no brains? or, possessing brains, do
they never use them in their profession? The
first and last requisite for an architect is thought.
The men who designed and built our cathedrals
and abbeys were among the best masons who ever
lived in any country or in any age; but there is
bad masonry in the best of these buildings.
The bedding and the jointing are absolute
perfection; but the filling in of the walls, the
combination of ashlar and of rubble, has been a
cause of weakness. Stones have also been
moulded, cut, carved, and exposed to weights
and to weather which no stone of the kind could
carry or withstand.

That which is wrong in principle never can
be corrected in detail. The Commons' House of
England have got for the nation's money a
splendid blunder, a gorgeous gimcrack, which
must, at no distant date, be a picturesque ruin.
Surface painting and patented dressings of the
surface may retard for a time, but cannot remove
the inherent causes of rapid and inevitable ruin.

The Commissioners of 1839, in their report,
state that " buildings in this climate are generally
found to suffer the greatest amount of
decomposition on their southern, south-western,
and western fronts, arising, doubtless, from a
prevalence of winds and driving rains from
these quarters; hence it is desirable that stones
of greater durability should at least be
employed in fronts with such aspects." This
recommendation of the Commissioners might also
just as well have included a warning as to the
amount of tracery and enrichments to be used
"in fronts with such aspects." The Commissioners
further remark: " Buildings situated
in the country appear to possess a great advantage
over those in populous and smoky towns,
owing to lichens, with which they almost
invariably become covered in such situations, and
which, when firmly established over their entire
surface, seem to exercise a protective influence
against the ordinary causes of the decomposition
of the stones upon which they grow."

These are curious remarks for eminent scientific
commissioners to make; they savour more
of artistic feeling, of an eye for colour, than
of sound, rigid, scientific induction. The
growth of lichens destroys stone, but does
not in any way protect it. Lichen-covered
stones would endure longer, without
such vegetable growth, than with it. Some
remarks are made as to the appearance of several
frusta of columns and other blocks of stone
quarried in the island of Portland at the time
of the erection of St. Paul's Cathedral in London,
and now covered by a growth of lichens, beneath
which can be seen even the marks of the chisel
employed upon them more than a hundred and
fifty years ago. These frusta and blocks are
only the Old Parrs of their day. We ought to