“The Corinthian column represents the delicacy of a young girl, at the age when the figure is slender and best suited to the display of ornaments which may add to her natural beauty. The invention of its capital is due to the following incident: A young girl of Corinth, who was about to marry, having died, her nurse placed some little vases which she had been fond of during her life, in a basket on her tomb, and, in order that the weather should not spoil them, she placed a tile on the basket. This, having been laid accidentally over an acanthus-root, it came to pass, when the leaves began to grow, that the stems of the plant crept up the sides of the basket and, meeting the corners of the tile, were forced to curve downward, and to take the form of volutes. Callimachus, a sculptor and architect, struck by the harmonious result, imitated it in the capitals of columns which he subsequently made in Corinth, establishing on this model the proportions of the Corinthian order.” [Illustration: DORIC. IONIC. CORINTHIAN. THE GREEK ORDERS.] At this stage it is necessary to explain briefly that an order consists of a column, the pedestal upon which it stands, and the entablature, or top member, which it supports. The column is subdivided into the capital, or head; the shaft, or body; and the base, or foot. The entablature has likewise three divisions: the architrave, or beam sustained by the columns; the frieze, or space occupied by the cross-beams; and the cornice, or line of stone marking the extremity of the rafters. These were originally made of wood and subsequently imitated in stone.[2] [2] Viollet le Duc maintained that the Greek buildings were in no sense an imitation of wooden constructions, but gave no very satisfactory explanation of the origin of their component parts. It is perhaps best to conclude that they were adaptations of pre-existing edifices to new materials. The Greek Doric column had no base and rested upon a series of steps in place of the pedestal. The ends of the cross-beams were marked upon the frieze by a projection, upon which were cut three grooves into which the rain-water ran and fell in drops to the ground. These drops were represented in stone underneath, completing an ornament which was called a triglyph (meaning in Greek, three grooves). The spaces intervening between the triglyphs were called metopes. The inclination of the sides of the roof formed the lines of the triangular termination which we call the pediment. The Greeks employed three methods in their Doric, namely, the hexametric, heptametric, and octometric, that is, a proportion of six, seven, and eight diameters to the height. We have seen what were the component parts of the Ionic and Corinthian orders in the quotation from Vitruvius.