In the “Ionic Order” exactly the same idea of the symbolisation of the balance of material and intellectual forces is carried out with the same integrity as in the Doric, though with less simplicity and obviousness. The idea of elasticity--as noticed by Franz Kugler in his _Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte_ for the first time--is added to that of simple upward met by simple downward force. It occurs especially in the base and the volutes of the column, as these members are found modified and perfected by the Attic architects. By tracing the growth of the Attic base, much light will be thrown upon the Greek architectural idea. A base is a support for the shaft. The Doric had no base, because the notion of any weight to be supported was not allowed to be expressed anywhere but in the entablature; the Ionic differing from the Doric mainly in this--that the visible conflict between weight and supporting power, which in the Doric was wholly concentrated upon the abacus, or tile, where the column met the entablature, was in the Ionic so distributed that almost every member was at once agent and reagent, expressing an adequate power of supporting what was above it, but also requiring support from that which was below. A great square stone or plinth is the simplest form of base; but this would have looked poor and inorganic underneath the elaborately fluted and voluted column. The square stone cut into a circle with its edges rounded is the next simplest form; but it was left for the Romans to use this base, for they had not the sensitive eye that discerned the fatal effect of swelling or sufferance from weight which this cushion-like form conveys. The first Ionic base had a _scotia_, or hollow receding moulding, under the round _torus_. This contradicted the above impression; but it did it violently and awkwardly. Finally, the Attic base was formed of a large torus below, a smaller one above, and the scotia, or receding moulding, between them; so that the base--which, on the whole, was a spreading and supporting member--was nevertheless narrowest where it would have been thickest had it suffered, like a cushion, from the weight it carried. The fluting of the Ionic order, while it expressed ascendant force like the Doric, had a flat space or fillet instead of a sharp edge between each concavity, and each line of fluting had semicircular terminations. The effect of this was to endow the shaft itself with a substantive expression of weight, which had no existence in the Doric shaft, that flew, like a sheaf of arrows, from the earth to strike against the ovolo of the capital. The Ionic capital, like the Ionic base, had its elastic character perfectly developed by Attic architects. In the original Ionic the ears of the volutes simply hang on either side of the ovolo like horns; but in Attic specimens they appear to be formed by the pressure of the entablature upon a series of elastic curves. The Ionic abacus differs from the Doric in expressing,