When I published my first work on Indian architecture thirty years ago, I was reproached for making dogmatic assertions, and propounding theories which I did not even attempt to sustain. The defect was, I am afraid, inevitable. My conclusions were based upon the examination of the actual buildings throughout the three Presidencies of India and in China during ten years’ residence in the East, and to have placed before the world the multitudinous details which were the ground of my generalisations, would have required an additional amount of description and engravings which was not warranted by the interest felt in the subject at that time. The numerous engravings in the present volume, the extended letterpress, and the references to works of later labourers in the wide domain of Indian architecture, will greatly diminish, but cannot entirely remove, the old objection. No man can direct his mind for forty years to the earnest investigation of any department of knowledge, and not become acquainted with a host of particulars, and acquire a species of insight which neither time, nor space, nor perhaps the resources of language will permit him to reproduce in their fulness. I possess, to give a single instance, more than 3000 photographs of Indian buildings, with which constant use has made me as familiar as with any other object that is perpetually before my eyes, and to recapitulate all the information they convey to long-continued scrutiny, would be an endless, if not indeed an impossible undertaking. The necessities of the case demand that broad results should often be given when the evidence for the statements must be merely indicated or greatly abridged, and if the conclusions sometimes go beyond the appended proofs, I can only ask my readers to believe that the assertions are not speculative fancies, but deductions from facts. My endeavour from the first has been to present a distinct view of the general principles which have governed the historical development of Indian architecture, and my hope is that those who pursue the subject beyond the pages of the present work, will find that the principles I have enunciated will reduce to order the multifarious details, and that the details in turn will confirm the principles. Though the vast amount of fresh knowledge which has gone on accumulating since I commenced my investigations has enabled me to correct, modify, and enlarge my views, yet the classification I adopted, and the historical sequences I pointed out thirty years since, have in their essential outlines been confirmed, and will continue, I trust, to stand good. Many subsidiary questions remain unsettled, but my impression is, that not a few of the discordant opinions that may be observed, arise principally from the different courses which inquirers have pursued in their investigations. Some men of great eminence and learning, more conversant with books than buildings, have naturally drawn their knowledge and inferences from