Page:Pattern design - a book for students treating in a practical way of the anatomy, planning & evolution of repeated ornament.djvu/11

 PREFACE. A MAX has a right, I suppose, to pull down the building he once put up, and to raise another in its place. If he should see fit to use sometimes the ver' stones which belonged to it, he would only be stealing from himself. I have done something very much like that. In the course of the last fifteen years the times have changed, and with them the standpoint of students and teachers of design; and, though my point of view has not altered, my outlook has widened with experience. When it came to the revision of " The Anatomy of Pattern " with a view to a fifth edition, it seemed to me I had done all I could do to it, that it was past mending, and that the simplest thing would be to start afresh. The present volume, however, though it covers the ground of the former one, and answers much the same purpose, is not the same, but really a new book upon the foundations of the old one. It contains, indeed, all that was in the other, but otherwise expressed. Here and there an explanation or description, which, by revision after revision, had been reduced to the fewest and plainest words I could find, has been allowed to stand. So with the illustrations, the greater number of them are new. Such of the old diagrams as were essential to the purpose of the book have been drawn again, not merely on the larger scale allowed by the page, but in a simpler and more self-explanatory way