might refer to as American, just as we speak of
Byzantine or Gothic? Are we waiting for somebody to invent it? We think,
maybe, that it is to spring forth, ready made, like Minerva from the
brain of Zeus. If this is our idea, we might as well give up at once and
confess to the world our imbecility. Never, from Adam's day to this, did
anybody ever invent a new architecture. It is purely a matter of
genealogy. For just as we trace back a family line, can we trace the
generations of art. Spite of its complications, many an offshoot can be
followed up directly to the parent stock. Taking, for example, the
mediaeval architecture of Spain, the brilliant 'Moresco,' we find it to
be a combination of the vigorous Gothic of the North with the beautiful
though effeminate Saracenic--the exotic of the South. And of these
latter, each is traceable, though by different lines, to the same great
prototype, the Roman. For when Rome was divided, the Dome fell to the
inheritance of the Eastern Empire, and the Basilica (which was only a
Greek temple turned inside out) to the Western. The former, joined to
the Arabian, and the latter to the Gothic, formed two great families,
from the union of whose descendants sprang the Moresco. But even the
Roman was a derivative style, leading us back successively through
Greece, Assyria, and Egypt. Each step is visibly allied to the
preceding, and yet how unlike the pyramid and the Spanish cathedral! Did
history permit, all the styles that have ever existed could be traced in
the same way; it is quite as easy to account for their diversities, as
for those of the nations that produced them. Ham and Japheth were of the
same household, yet how different their descendants of to-day! As from
one man sprang all people, so was there an original germ of architecture
from which all successive styles have been derived.

The composite forms that have arisen since commerce and civilization
have brought the ends of the world together, increase the complication.
There have been marriages and intermarriages, some good matches and some
bad ones, some with vigorous and some with sickly offspring, and some
hybrids of such monstrous malformation as almost to make us fear that a
new style can be invented. But the effect is impossible without the
cause. Save the mysterious Pyramids, every structure extant acknowledges
its ancestry. If physiologists are fond of claiming the history of the
race as one of their own chapters, ar