its functions, and
when these are many and diverse, their reconcilement one with another.
This being so, a study of the human figure with a view to analyzing
the sources of its beauty cannot fail to be profitable to the
architectural designer. Pursued intelligently, such study will
stimulate the mind to a perception of those simple yet subtle laws
according to which nature everywhere works, and it will educate
the eye in the finest known school of proportion, training it to
distinguish minute differences, in the same way that the hearing of
good music cultivates the ear.

It is neither necessary nor desirable to make elaborate and carefully
shaded drawings from a posed model; an equal number of hours spent in
copying and analyzing the plates of a good art anatomy, supplemented
with a certain amount of life drawing, done merely with a view to
catch the pose, will be found to be a more profitable exercise, for it
will make you familiar with the principal and subsidiary proportions
of the bodily temple, and give you sufficient data to enable you to
indicate a figure in any position with fair accuracy.

I recommend the study of Nature because I believe that such study
will assist you to recover that direct and instant perception of
beauty, our natural birthright, of which over-sophistication has
so bereft us that we no longer know it to be ours by right of
inheritance--inheritance from that cosmic matter endowed with
motion out of which we are fashioned, proceeding ever rationally and
rhythmically to its appointed ends. We are all of us participators in
a world of concrete music, geometry and number--a world, that is, so
mathematically constituted and co-ordinated that our pigmy bodies,
equally with the farthest star, throb to the music of the spheres. The
blood flows rhythmically, the heart its metronome; the moving limbs
weave patterns; the voice stirs into radiating sound-waves that pool
of silence which we call the air.

"Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."

The whole of animate creation labours under the beautiful necessity of
being beautiful. Everywhere it exhibits a perfect utility subservient
to harmonious laws. Nature is the workshop in which are built
_beautiful organisms_. This is exactly the aim of the architect--to
fashion beautiful organisms; what better school, therefore, could he