During this fifteenth century the Renaissance style matured in Italy, where it speedily triumphed over Gothic fashions and produced a marvellous series of civic monuments, palaces, and churches, adorned with forms borrowed or imitated from classic Roman art. This influence spread through Europe in the sixteenth century, and ran a course of two centuries, after which a period of servile classicism was followed by a rapid decline in taste. To this succeeded the eclecticism and confusion of the nineteenth century, to which the rapid growth of new requirements and development of new resources have largely contributed. In Eastern lands three great schools of architecture have grown up contemporaneously with the above phases of Western art; one under the influence of Mohammedan civilization, another in the Brahman and Buddhist architecture of India, and the third in China and Japan. The first of these is the richest and most important. Primarily inspired from Byzantine art, always stronger on the decorative than on the constructive side, it has given to the world the mosques and palaces of Northern Africa, Moorish Spain, Persia, Turkey, and India. The other two schools seem to be wholly unrelated to the first, and have no affinity with the architecture of Western lands. Of Mexican, Central American, and South American architecture so little is known, and that little is so remote in history and spirit from the styles above enumerated, that it belongs rather to archæology than to architectural history, and will not be considered in this work. NOTE.--The reader’s attention is called to the Appendix to this volume, in which are gathered some of the results of recent investigations and of the architectural progress of the last few years which could not readily be introduced into the text of this edition. The General Bibliography and the lists of books recommended have been revised and brought up to date. CHAPTER I. PRIMITIVE AND PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE. BOOKS RECOMMENDED: Desor, _Les constructions lacustres du lac de Neufchatel_. Fergusson, _Rude Stone Monuments_. R. C. Hoare, _Ancients Wiltshire_. Lyell, _The Antiquity of Man_. Lubbock, _Prehistoric Times_. Nadaillac, _Prehistoric America_. Rougemont, _L’age du Bronze_. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_.