If architecture was practised by us on the same principles that guided either the Classic or Gothic architects in their designs, a static treatise on it would not only be the most instructive but the most pleasing form of teaching its elements. Owing, however, to the system of copying which is now the basis of all designs, this is no longer the case, and the consequently abnormal position of the art renders the study of its principles almost impossible, and memory must supply the place of pure reason for their elucidation, thus giving to the narrative branch of the subject a somewhat exaggerated importance, even when looked at from a merely technic point of view. Besides this, however, the narrative form as applied to Architecture has advantages of its own greater than those of any other art of the same class, inasmuch as it is a great stone book in which most of the nations of the earth have recorded their annals, and written their thoughts, and even expressed their feelings in clearer and truer language than by any other form of utterance. The pyramids and temples of Egypt are a truer expression of the feelings and aspirations of their builders than we can obtain from any other source. The Parthenon at Athens brings the age of Pericles more clearly before our eyes in all its perfection of art than any written page. The Flavian Amphitheatre and the Baths of Caracalla enable us to realise imperial Rome more vividly than even the glowing pages of Tacitus. Our Mediæval cathedrals are a living record of the faith and feelings of peoples, who have left, besides these, but few materials by which one could judge of their aspirations or of their civilisation; while, if we wish to know in what India differed from Europe in those ages, and in what respect she still resembled it, it is to her contemporary temples that we must turn, and they tell us in a language not to be mistaken wherein lay the differences, and still how nearly alike the civilisations at one time were. All this, and infinitely more, we may learn from a record, which, though often ruined and nearly obliterated, never deceives. Where it first was placed, there it still remains to tell to future generations what at that spot, at some previous time, men thought and felt; what their state of civilisation enabled them to accomplish, and to what stage they had attained in their conception of a God. Besides, however, the advantages to be obtained in an artistic point of view from treating architecture in a narrative rather than in a static form, there is, as pointed out above, still another, which, though of minor importance, still adds immensely to the interest of the subject. It is that, when so treated, the art affords one of the clearest and most certain tests known of the ethnographic relations of people one to another. It may, therefore, be as well, before proceeding further, to explain as briefly as is consistent with intelligibility what is meant by Architectural Ethnography.