Sometimes an inherited form taken to a new home proves to be faulty there, and is discarded. When Normandy sent forth its children to Canada, they built on the shores of the St. Lawrence just such high-pitched roofs as had sheltered them in Caen and Rouen. An example remains at Montreal in the roof of Notre Dame de Bonsecours. But in Montreal and Quebec the snowfall is much heavier than in Northern France, and the Norman roofs at intervals from December to March were wont to let loose their avalanches with an effect at times deadly. To-day, therefore, in French Canada many of the roofs, especially in towns and cities, are flat or nearly flat, while the best models quite reverse the old design. In breadths somewhat concave they catch the snow as in a basin, and allow it to melt slowly so as to run down a pipe through the center of the building. Under our eyes, day by day, iron and steel are taking the place of stone and wood in architecture and engineering; yet the force of habit leads us to continue in metal many troublesome details which were imperative in the weak building materials of generations past. It was as recently as the autumn of 1903 that the first large American theater was opened having no columns to obstruct views of its stage. The architects of the New Amsterdam Theater, New York, simply by availing themselves of the strength of steel cantilevers have shown that henceforth all large auditoriums may be free from obstructions to a view of the stage, pulpit or platform. See facing page 118. Modern architecture, in the judgment of an eminent critic, has not yet fully responded to its new materials and methods. Says Mr. Russell Sturgis, of New York, in “How to Judge Architecture”:--“Every important change in building, in the past, has been accomplished by a change in the method of design, so that even in the times of avowed revival there was seen no attempt to stick to the old way of designing while the new method of construction was adopted; now in the nineteenth century, and in what we have seen of the twentieth century, our great new systems of building have flourished and developed themselves without effect as yet upon our methods of design. We still put a simulacrum of a stone wall with stone window casings and pediments and cornices and great springing arches outside of thin, light, scientifically combined, carefully calculated metal--the appearance of a solid tower supported by a reality of slender props and bars.” CHAPTER X SIZE Heavenly bodies large and small . . . The earth as sculptured a little at a time . . . The farmer as a divider . . . Dust and its dangers . . . Models may mislead . . . Big structures economical . . . Smallness of atoms . . . Advantages thereof . . . A comet may be more repelled by the sun’s light than attracted by his mass.