even more elegant than those in Parvati’s porch at Chillambaram; but they are--some of them at least--attached to the pier by very elegant open-work, such as is found in Pratapa Rudra’s temple at Worangul (Woodcut No. 217) or in the windows at Hullabîd. As both these examples are earlier than 1300, it might seem that this one was so also, but it is difficult to feel certain when comparing buildings so distant in locality, and belonging to different styles of art. On the whole, however, I am inclined to believe that between 1300 and 1400 will be found the true date of this porch. The date of the porch at Peroor is ascertained within narrow limits by the figure of a Sepoy loading a musket being carved on the base of one of its pillars, and his costume and the shape of his arm are exactly those we find in contemporary pictures of the wars of Aurungzebe, or the early Mahrattas, in the beginning of the 18th century. As shown in Woodcut No. 209, the bracket shafts are there attached to the piers as in Tirumulla Nayak’s buildings, and though the general character of the architecture is the same, there is a coarseness in the details, and a marked inferiority in the figure-sculpture, that betrays the distance of date between these two examples. [Illustration: 207. Portico of Temple at Vellore.] Slight as the difference may appear to the unpractised eye, it is within the four centuries that include the dates of these two buildings (1350 to 1750) that practically the whole history of the Dravidian [Illustration: 208. Compound Pillar at Vellore. (From a Photograph.)] [Illustration: 209. Compound Pillar at Peroor. (From a Photograph.)] temple architecture is included. There are rock-cut examples before the first date, and some structural buildings in Dharwar on a smaller scale, which are older, but it is safe to assert that nine-tenths, at least, or more, of those which are found south of the Tongabhadra, were erected between these dates. Of course it is not meant to assert that, before the first of these dates, there were not structural temples in the south of India. So far from this being the case, it seems nearly certain that during the six or seven centuries that elapsed between the carving of the rocks at Mahavellipore and the erection of the Vellore pagoda, numerous buildings must have been erected in order that a style should be elaborated and so fixed that it should endure for five centuries afterwards, with so little change, and with only that degradation in detail, which is the fatal characteristic of art in India.