obsolete as it seems, even the practice of making Latin verses has its great benefits in imparting to the pupil the command of literary form and of beauty of diction. There are many examples to sustain this contention, as well as the analogous contention that a faithful study and reproduction of antique or of mediæval architecture are highly useful, if not altogether indispensable, to cultivate an architect’s power of design. Only it may be pointed out that the use of these studies is to enable the student to express himself with more power and grace in the vernacular, and that one no longer reverts to Latin verse when he has really something to say. The monuments that are accepted as models by the modern world are themselves the results of the labors of successive generations. It was by a secular process that the same structural elements employed at Thebes and Karnac were developed to the perfection of the Parthenon. In proportion to the newness of their problems it is to be expected that the efforts of our architects will be crude; but there is a vast difference between the crudity of a serious and matured attempt to do a new thing and the crudity of mere ignorance and self-sufficiency. Evidently the progress of American architecture will not be promoted by the labors of designers, whether they be “Western” or “Eastern,” who have merely “lived in the alms basket” of architectural forms, and whose notion of architecture consists in multiplying “features,” as who should think to enhance the expressiveness of the human countenance by adorning it with two noses.