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Art in its early stages seldom displays any outright invention; with all the force of habit the savage artist clings to old familiar shapes, and it is interesting to remark how dealing with a new material may lead or even oblige him to modify a traditional form. The Algonquins inhabit a country in which the birch is common. They cut and fold its bark into vessels which, when imitated in pottery, have an unusual rectangularity. In many Indian tribes it was customary to use as a water-holder the paunch of a deer or a buffalo; many ancient urns of Central America have an aperture at an upper extremity, copied from the paunch, in every case with a simplification of outline. Winged troughs of wood were undoubtedly in the mind of the man who made the earthen vessel illustrated on the next page, found in an ancient grave in Arkansas. As usual the borrower put something of himself into his work, reminding us that the law of evolution is descent with modification. An earthen vessel, illustrated on the next page, was plainly copied from a shell vessel such as the specimen found not far off, in Indiana. When the Clallam Indians, of the State of Washington, began to weave baskets, they imitated the forms of their rude wicker fish-traps. The like persistence was shown by the Haida squaws when taught by the missionaries to make mats from rags; they repeated their ancient twined model, long employed for mats and hats of vegetable fibres. As in America, so also in Europe; when the makers of celts passed from stone to copper or bronze, they reproduced the old forms, and only gradually learned to economize metal, so much stronger than stone, and so much harder to get, by narrowing and flattening their new weapons and tools.

Vase from tumulus. St. George, Utah.

“Pottery of the Ancient Pueblos.” W. H. Holmes.

Wooden tray.

Clay derivative.

“Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art.” W. H. Holmes.

Shell vessel made from a Busycon perversum, found at Ritchersville, Indiana.

Earthen vessel, imitation of shell,

Missouri.

From W. H. Holmes’ “Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans.”

Electric lamps in candle shapes.

Modern manufacture in its designs gives us a kindred persistence of old forms in new things. For electric illumination we have bulbs which recall the shape of a candle-blaze, or surmount an old-fashioned candlestick; a gas-burner, popular for fifty years, repeats in milky porcelain the whole length of a candle. Gas-grates, in uncounted thousands throughout our cities every winter, offer us flames which flicker and leap over asbestos and clay molded into the semblance of maple or charcoal. Nor is the engineer himself, for all his sternness of discipline, quite free from prolonging the reign of the past, even at unwarrantable cost. When steel was first used for steam boilers there was a period of hesitation during which the metal was used unduly thick, as if to maintain the long familiar massiveness of iron structures. When automobiles were invented, they at first closely resembled common carriages. To-day, designers have departed from tradition, and provide us with horseless vehicles which respond to their new needs in ways wholly untrammeled by inherited ideas. In an automobile, driven by steam or gasoline, there must be due disposition of fuel, of machinery, of cooling apparatus, all so combined as to bring the center of gravity as low as may be best, affording ready access to any part needing lubrication, repair, or renewal; throughout there must be the minimum of dead weight, of friction, and of liability to derangement; all with means of easy, quick, and certain control. Why should these requirements be deferred to repeating the model of a carriage drawn by a horse? In Europe, to this hour, the railroad carriages are an imitation of the old road-coaches, horse carriages slightly modified. America, fortunately, from the first has had cars directly adapted to railroad exigencies, with a thoroughfare extending the whole length of a train, avoiding the box-like compartments which may give the lunatic or the murderer an opportunity to work his will.

Notre Dame de Bonsecours, Montreal. Before restoration.

NEW AMSTERDAM THEATRE, NEW YORK.

No pillars obstruct a full view of the stage.

Sometimes an inherited form taken to a new home proves to be faulty there, and is discarded. When Normandy sent forth its children to Canada, they built on the shores of the St. Lawrence just such high-pitched roofs as had sheltered them in Caen and Rouen. An example remains at Montreal in the roof of Notre Dame de Bonsecours. But in Montreal and Quebec the snowfall is much heavier than in Northern France, and the Norman roofs at intervals from December to March were wont to let loose their avalanches with an effect at times deadly. To-day, therefore, in French Canada many of the roofs, especially in towns and cities, are flat or nearly flat, while the best models quite reverse the old design. In breadths somewhat concave they catch the snow as in a basin, and allow it to melt slowly so as to run down a pipe through the center of the building.

Under our eyes, day by day, iron and steel are taking the place of stone and wood in architecture and engineering; yet the force of habit leads us to continue in metal many troublesome details which were imperative in the weak building materials of generations past. It was as recently as the autumn of 1903 that the first large American theater was opened having no columns to obstruct views of its stage. The architects of the New Amsterdam Theater, New York, simply by availing themselves of the strength of steel cantilevers have shown that henceforth all large auditoriums may be free from obstructions to a view of the stage, pulpit or platform. See facing page 118.

Modern architecture, in the judgment of an eminent critic, has not yet fully responded to its new materials and methods. Says Mr. Russell Sturgis, of New York, in “How to Judge Architecture”:—“Every important change in building, in the past, has been accomplished by a change in the method of design, so that even in the times of avowed revival there was seen no attempt to stick to the old way of designing while the new method of construction was adopted; now in the nineteenth century, and in what we have seen of the twentieth century, our great new systems of building have flourished and developed themselves without effect as yet upon our methods of design. We still put a simulacrum of a stone wall with stone window casings and pediments and cornices and great springing arches outside of thin, light, scientifically combined, carefully calculated metal—the appearance of a solid tower supported by a reality of slender props and bars.”