Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/457

Rh As Dr. Sarasin points out, the pile-dwelling served also as prototype of the Chinese and Japanese temples (in this case, since they are mostly constructed of wood the likeness is even more striking); likewise in Farther India, Hindustan, Arabia, Asia Minor, Egypt, etc., and even in prehistoric America. Moreover, not merely the "long temple," but the "round temple," goes back to the pile-house, as may be seen from the round pile-dwellings ascribed to the land of Punt, in Egyptian pictures dating from ca. 1500 which are practically identical in shape, etc., with pile-dwellings still to be seen in the Nicobar Islands and in certain parts of Africa.

Taken altogether, Sarasin's essay is one of the most interesting and suggestive contributions to the literature of the evolution of architecture that has appeared in a generation, and it illustrates the way in which the anthropological investigator can assist in the solution of many puzzling problems, which meet with no successful interpretation at the hands of the closet-student or the biased classicist. Dr. Sarasin has given but another proof of the fact that the highest genius of the ancient Greeks lay not in inventing great or beautiful things out-of-hand, but in idealizing, beautifying and harmonizing what had already long existed in common and wide-spread forms and fashions. And to that great art no human race is utterly a stranger; and many of them are much nearer the Greeks than most of us believe.