31. The derivation of the Greek types of form from the forest-hut is too direct to escape observation; but sufficient attention has not been paid to the similar petrifaction, by other nations, of the rude forms and materials adopted in the haste of early settlement, or consecrated by the purity of rural life. The whole system of Swiss and German Gothic has thus been most characteristically affected by the structure of the intersecting timbers at the angles of the chalet. This was in some cases directly and without variation imitated in stone, as in the piers of the old bridge at Aarburg; and the practice obtained--partially in the German after-Gothic--universally, or nearly so, in Switzerland--of causing moldings which met at an angle to appear to interpenetrate each other, both being truncated immediately beyond the point of intersection. The painfulness of this ill-judged adaptation was conquered by association--the eye became familiarized to uncouth forms of tracery--and a stiffness and meagerness, as of cast-iron, resulted in the moldings of much of the ecclesiastical, and all the domestic Gothic of central Europe; the moldings of casements intersecting so as to form a small hollow square at the angles, and the practice being further carried out into all modes of decoration--pinnacles interpenetrating crockets, as in a peculiarly bold design of archway at Besancon. The influence at Venice has been less immediate and more fortunate; it is with peculiar grace that the majestic form of the ducal palace reminds us of the years of fear and endurance when the exiles of the Prima Venetia settled like home-less birds on the sea-sand, and that its quadrangular range of marble wall and painted chamber, raised upon multiplied columns of confused arcade,[6] presents but the exalted image of the first pile-supported hut that rose above the rippling of the lagoons. 32. In the chapter on the "Influence of Habit and Religion," of Mr. Hope's Historical Essay,[7] the reader will find further instances of the same feeling, and, bearing immediately on our present purpose, a clear account of the derivation of the Egyptian temple from the excavated cavern; but the point to which in all these cases we would direct especial attention, is, that the first perception of the great laws of architectural _proportion_ is dependent for its acuteness less on the aesthetic instinct of each nation than on the mechanical conditions of stability and natural limitations of size in the primary type, whether hut, chalet, or tent.