Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/456

450 Hungary, for example) much later, pile-dwellings of the kind in (pies- tion. In Greece and many other parts of the then known world, the original human dwelling was the house on piles, which, therefore, was also the first dwelling of the gods and the first temple — the orthodox temple, as Sarasin phrases it— was a pile-dwelling. In very ingenious fashion Sarasin shows how the peculiarities of the various portions of the Greek temple can be developed from the pile-dwelling. The megaron, too, finds an analogue in the lobo, or "men's house" of Malaysia.

The simplest form of the column is, of course, the pile driven into the pillar or resting upon it; the basis of the Ionic and Corinthian columns is to be seen in the stones placed under the piles to prevent too early decay, etc. The so-called echinus, the lower, round portion of the capital of the Doric column, corresponds to the round disc of stone or wood placed on top of the piles as a protection against rats, etc. The abacus has also its prototype in the pile-dwelling in the rest- piece for the beams, which is placed on the middle of the disc just described. The so-called proto-Doric columns of Egypt, which lack the echinus, go back, Sarasin suggests, to a pile-dwelling without such protective discs. The perpendicularity of the columns of the Ionic and Corinthian temples, as well as the slight upper inclination of the Doric, comes naturally enough from the conditions of the wooden piles and their arrangement. So also square columns and even fluting. The so-called ædicula, according to Sarasin, is derived, not from the tent, as some have supposed, but from the small shade-roof seen in front of many Celebean pile-dwellings, under which the occupants sit protected from sun and rain. The "wall-temples" and the cellæ are easily developed from the open space under the dwelling in the pile- houses by building in between the columns — the prototypes are seen in the Celebean houses. The transformation of the upper part of the pile-dwelling, when no longer used for habitation, into the super- structure of the Greek temple with its ornamentation (the frieze has its forerunner in the pile-dwelling's wooden carvings, etc.) was easily possible with an artistically-minded people. The substitution of stone for wood. Dr. Sarasin thinks, may have been an Egyptian invention.

If the present writer may 1)0 permitted to add to the ideas set forth by Dr. Sarasin, he would like to suggest the possibility of the existence of pile-dwellings in caves (such have been reported from pre- historic Sicily) having had something to do with the development of the original wooden pile-dwelling into the stone temple.

The theory of Sarasin has the advantage of proposing as the origi- nal prototype of the Greek temple something that was more or less cosmopolitan, a building that was common and natural over a large portion of the prehistoric world, and not some merely "local" model.