hold with delight and astonishment in the best productions of it. It never was at one stay; it was continually increasing, improving, refining, and altering, by the constant addition of new beauties, new forms of elegance and delicacy, and sometimes new absurdities, invented at distant times and in different countries of the world; and it would require more than the life and industry of one man to discover and ascertain the birth-place of each; and every one of them, wherever it was produced, seems to have been carried with most wonderful celerity into all the other countries of Europe. It is much to be wished that somebody could solve that strange phenomenon of Gothic Architecture being so generally and widely spread over the world, and that there should be such an almost perfect uniformity of style at the same time in all the several countries, however distant, where it was known. And here I feel much inclined to venture upon an observation, if I did not suspect it to be nonsense; but no matter if it is, that the disagreeable, inelegant, ugly forms (wherever produced) did not meet with a general reception in the different countries, but the elegant and graceful did. I cannot help thinking that I have seen in the Great Church at Milan, at Ely, and in other places, particular forms of deformity, which, if not peculiar to those places, are at least such as we do not commonly meet with elsewhere, a sort of provincial style of absurdity or ugliness. I have observed none such of beauty.

"I hope your friend means to have the drawings you speak of engraved and published; that must always be to the purpose, provided it be done fairly, and that they are not warped or altered to make them favour some particular theory. Persuade him, if you can, to let them be had separate from his book, after it has had its sale; that will make them doubly and trebly useful.

"If he be going to look after the origin of the Gothic (impointed) arch, I heartily wish him good luck. There are evidently two questions, how it was invented, and when and where. it was invented?

"About the first old Bentham and Mr. Essex always were at daggers drawing; neither of them made much of the matter, and two or three other theories, how it might have been hit on on or invented, may easily be produced, just as plausible as either of theirs; but how a thing might possibly have been done, and how it actually was done, are two very different inquiries; and here it was that Sir James Hall split. As to the other question, when and where it was discovered, there seems to be no hope of our getting a satisfactory answer. Euclid taught us how to make the figure, it is the first proposition in his book; but where and when an arch of that figure was actually built of real stone and mortar is a different matter; as it also is, who they were that first of all men put an arch of that figure into a design for building. If I were obliged to guess at this matter,

I should say these things were probably first done somewhere in Germany. The Italians have always called architecture of this sort, which we call Gothic, German Architecture, to distinguish it from the old heavy kind, which they call Lombard; they have not a great deal of it south of Lombardy. They retained the round arch much longer, I think, in Italy, than in Germany, France, or England, but they applied the delicacies of the Gothic style to those arches; see the Cathedrals of Venice, Florence, Orvieto, and Siena. Perhaps if we had a mind to indulge conjectures, and yet wish to avoid talking sillily, we might venture to suppose, by way of a general notion, that the Pointed Arch, that great foundation and criterion of Gothic Architecture, was of Northern original; and that most or many of the delicate, tender, elegant members of it, or at least the taste for lightness, slenderness, and subtilising, came to us from the East. So if any part of this appears to be sense, you are at full liberty to communicate it to your friend, or whom you will.

"Pray who managed the book about St. Stephen's Chapel ? I like that best of all that the Antiquaries have published; there is more detail of the parts, which are the life and soul of the things *. Yours sincerely, T. KERRICH."

10. "DEAR BALME, Burnham, May 6, 1820. "You have pleasure in reading letters, so here is another; and I will try to make it such a one as you wish to have from me.

"My great object in all that I have ever done, or thought, or written about Norman and Gothic Architecture, was to recover, if possible, the rules and principles of the science or art (whichever you may choose to call it), which are lost; and this I should not despair of seeing effected if men would seriously examine and study the buildings in those styles that are left, so as to understand them, and not waste their time in frivolous disputes as to what they should be called, or fruitless inquiries from whence Gothic Architecture was brought, and hopeless guesses concerning the origin of the Pointed Arch. All these I have endeavoured to discourage as much as I could in the former dissertation I sent to the Society, which was meant as a mere introduction to that now before them, which is the result of many years' study, and a patient examination of a great number of buildings. I in that made some remarks upon the particular nature of Gothic Architecture, the simplicity of its leading forms, the astonishing variety of which it is capable, which exceeds infinitely every thing that could possibly be done in the Antique, or, as it is called, regular Architecture. I hinted the use which had been made of a mysterious figure (for which we had no name) by the old architects in making their designs, long

* The account of St. Stephen's Chapel, which accompanies Mr. Carter's drawings, was written by John Topham, Esq. Treas. S.A. A Supplement to it was afterwards published, with Mr. Smirke's drawings.

before the Pointed Arch was in vogue. I observed its having been used for the form of ecclesiastical seals, and other things designed for sacred purposes; and said, that on accidentally looking into Albert Durer's book of Geometry, I had found that he named it Vesica Piscis. He must therefore answer for that name; I only adopted it as better than Gothic Oval or Gothic Ellipsis, which is absolutely intolerable, but I have heard it called by both these names; and I believe I went so far as to assert, that the influence of this figure was very extensive. This I meant to show, so far as architecture is concerned, in the present paper, which I then meditated, and have now sent.

66

"There was some other loose matter in the former dissertation, I fancy of no great consequence, which I do not recollect, and I have it not here with me; but I remember full well I ended it with some foolish popular stuff about the Great Church at Milan, which I heartily repent having ever written; there is nothing in it but what the silliest man upon earth who had been at Milan might have told us; and I have had the mortification to find it was so well relished by some of my readers that they attended to nothing else, and seem to have overlooked, or rather skipped every thing in the Dissertation that had any sense in it. I was determined not to fall again into the same error; and in the present paper have adhered strictly to my purpose, which was to show the truth of what I had before asserted concerning the use of this mysterious figure, which A. Durer calls Vesica Piscis; so far as relates to Gothic Architecture and the Architecture of the Middle Ages. Perhaps one might say the Architecture of Christian nations; but I believe it had better be omitted, so we will let the matter stand as it is. If the notions produced in this paper have any foundation; if they are right, or nearly right, which there is surely good reason to believe they are, one very considerable step is gained, for we have discovered the rule by which the old architects formed many of their designs of plans, doors, windows, &c. &c. and the mode in which they proceeded to adjust their proportions. I do not pretend that I have found out all their rules, much less that I have arrived at the principles of their architecture; that is the very pinnacle we are striving to attain; but I do think I have here pointed out a track, which, if pursued, may lead men so nearly right that there is no reason to despair of their attaining the high point we have or ought to have in view. Rules are for workmen, principles are the object to men of sense and philosophers.

"Now you may do exactly as you please with all this; you may communicate the whole, or as much of it as you think proper, to our brother Antiquaries.

"Yours sincerely,

T. KERRICH."

830

SIR JAMES EDWARD SMITH, M. D. F.R.S.

was President (from its establishment) of the Linnæan Society; Honorary Member of the Horticultural Society; Member of the Academies of Stockholm, Upsal, Turin, Lisbon, Philadelphia, New York, &c. the Imperial Academy Naturæ Curiosorum; and the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris.

He was born in the City of Norwich, Dec. 2, 1759, the eldest of seven children, whose father, a Protestant Dissenter, and a respectable dealer in the woollen trade, was a man of much intelligence and vigour of mind. His mother, who was the daughter of a clergyman, lived in Norwich to the advanced age of eighty-eight, revered for the benevolence, cheerfulness, and activity of her character.

It is probably to the locality of his birth that we are to attribute his early predilection for natural history; for at Norwich he associated with some of the earliest and most devoted disciples of the great Linnæus. That city has, for more than two hundred years, been famous for its florists and botanists. There lived and flourished Sir Thomas Browne, the author of "Vulgar Errors," and "The Garden of Cyrus; or the quincuncial, lozenge, or network Plantations of the Ancients, artificially, naturally, and mystically considered." A weaver of that commercial place claims the honour of having been the first person who raised, from seed, a lycopodium; as a Manchester weaver was the first to flower one of our rarest jungermanniæ. During the middle of the last century, Mr. Rose, the author of the "Elements of Botany," Mr. Pitchford, and Mr. Crowe, names familiar to every botanist, took the lead in botanical science in their native city; and instilled into the youthful mind of the future President an ardent attachment to their favourite pursuit, and the