Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/13

 PREFACE. ix and these by far the most important have been added. These, with the new chronological and topographical details, present the subject to the English reader, in a more compact and complete form than has been attempted in any work on Indian architecture hitherto published. It does not, as I feel only too keenly, contain all the information that could be desired, but I am afraid it contains nearly all that the materials at present available will admit of being utilised, in a general history of the style. When I published my first work on Indian architecture thirty years ago, I was reproached for making dogmatic asser- tions, and propounding theories which I did not even attempt to sustain. The defect was, I am afraid, inevitable. My conclusions were based upon the examination of the actual buildings throughout the three Presidencies of India and in China during ten years' residence in the East, and to have placed before the world the multitudinous details which were the ground of my generalisations, would have required an additional amount of description and engravings which was not warranted by the interest felt in the subject at that time. The numerous engravings in the present volume, the extended letterpress, and the references to works of later labourers in the wide domain of Indian architecture, will greatly diminish, but cannot entirely remove, the old objection. No man can direct his mind for forty years to the earnest investigation of any department of knowledge, and not become acquainted with a host of particulars, and acquire a species of insight which neither time, nor space, nor perhaps the resources of language will permit him to reproduce in their fulness. I possess, to give a single instance, more than 3,000 photographs of Indian buildings, with which constant use has made me as familiar as with any other object that is perpetually before my eyes, and to recapitulate all the information they convey to long- continued scrutiny, would be an endless, if not indeed an impossible undertaking. The necessities of the case demand