from other human actions, instead of being like original ideas in a well-ordered composition. In other words, the ordinary human brain has tried to be automatic, as if to be in harmony with the rest of the vital organs. Now the architecture of bridges, like that of huts and houses and cottages, never fails to keep before our minds the awful slowness of each reluctant advance from custom to custom, and from convention to convention. I have no words to describe the terror that comes to me when I find in daily use a type or species of bridge so aboriginal in its poor workmanship that a forerunner not only similar to it, but as rudely effective, may well have been employed by the earliest Flint Men, whose delight in imitation was stimulated by all the bridges which Nature had created. Even more, at this moment in England, and even in busy Lancashire, where to-day’s machinery abounds, there are primitive bridges which are not even primitively structural; bridges which need in their making not more thought than is given to a difficult sneeze when we are troubled by a cold (p. 60). When I look at them and think of the myriads of generations which in different parts of the world have used bridges akin to these, I am so awed with fear that I feel like a baby Gulliver in a new Brobdingnag where everlasting conventions are impersonated by brainless giants whose bodies are too vast for my eyes to focus. Often, too, I say to myself: “In the presence of this dreadful conservatism, this inept mimicry that endures unruffled by a thought for many thousands of years, you are as futile as a single microbe would be on a field of battle. Or imagine that the microbe is in Westminster Abbey, and that it has a blurred sense that makes it dimly conscious of all the many historic things there gathered together; then you have a figure of yourself in your relation to the mingled good and bad in history. For the Abbey shows in its architecture that convention, though a bane to ordinary minds, is the grammar of progress to the rare men of genius who from time to time shake the world free from its bondage to fixed customs and routines, and compel it to move on to other routines and customs, where it will dawdle until other geniuses come out of the dark and find in new mother-ideas a compulsive force that works a new liberation.” [Illustration: OLD BRIDGE OVER THE CLAIN, NEAR POITIERS]