Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/455

Rh no means certain that its ancestor was the cattle-house of the natives of prehistoric central Europe, whatever their racial affinities were. Nevertheless, there are remarkable analogies between the prehistoric "winged house" and the ancient Greek peripteros. Fuchs's theory, however, is rather "local," and therefore not so widely applicable as that of Sarasin.

Dr. Paul Sarasin, who, with his cousin Fritz, is well known for notable researches among the primitive peoples of Ceylon, Celebes, etc., propounded before the Berlin Anthropological Society in 1906 a new and attractive theory of the origin of the Doric temple, viz., from the "lake-dwelling," or "pile-dwelling," characteristic of certain regions of the ancient and the modern world. His essay, with numerous illustrations, has since been published in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. It deserves the careful perusal of every student of the history of art and architecture, for his intimate knowledge of the "pile-dwelling," particularly in Celebes, enables Dr. Sarasin to go into very interesting details in this matter, and to set forth his arguments in a most striking manner, enforced by the illustrations, which are very much to the point, and also somewhat convincing. According to Sarasin, the Greek temple with columns "is a highly idealized and conventionalized expression of the original pile-dwelling"—the columns are the piles, the ornamented superstructure the dwelling fixed upon them, the triglyphs the window-strips, the metope the partition, etc. In order to fully appreciate the merits of Sarasin's theory one must bring up before the mind the wooden forerunner of the Doric peripteros: "The columns were wooden pillars, the architraves wooden beams, the triglyphs wooden strips, the metopes boards with carved ornament; the wooden roof was covered with mud-thatch, and the wooden ridge ended in a bird made of cut boards (the acroterion)."Reducing the height of the columns a little, and increasing somewhat that of the superstructure, one has a building strikingly similar to (in many respects identical with) the pile-dwelling. The figures of the temple of Poseidon at Paestum and a pile-dwelling in Central Celebes show this very clearly. And it should be said that the pile-dwellings of Indonesia, occurring on land as well as in water, represent better a "pile-dwelling period," than the "reconstructed" lake-dwellings of Switzerland, During the later stone age and the bronze age. Dr. Sarasin thinks, moreover, pile-dwellings of a sort comparable with those to l)e met with in Celebes, were found over a considerable portion of Europe, not merely in lakes, rivers, etc., but also in swamps, and on the dry land. Such a one was, apparently the pile-dwelling of the Wauwyl bog investigated in 1004, and closely resembling the Celebean pile-dwelling of the marshy Lake Limbotto. In all probability there existed commonly in Europe to the end of the bronze age, and sporadically (in