This statement, however, though poetical, is much too sweeping to be literally correct as to architecture. The Greeks borrowed a little—a very little—not only from the Egyptians, but from the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Persians, and other western Asiatic races as well; but so altered what they had borrowed, so refined it and entwined it with original conceptions of their own, that the captive features could have returned again to their native lands without fear of detection. Indeed as to the origin of some of the architectural features which the Greeks are supposed to have taken from the countries of a more unrefined people to the south and east of them, and especially as to the volute, so conspicuous in the Ionic capital, which is supposed to have been a Persian conception, there is much dispute. Professor T. Roger Smith, of London, very truly observes: “We cannot put a finger upon any feature of Egyptian, Assyrian or Persian architecture the influence of which has survived to the present day, except such as were adopted by the Greeks. On the other hand, there is no feature, no ornament, nor even any principle of design which the Greek architects employed that can be said to have now become obsolete.” In discussing the three primary orders of which mention has been made, and to which he adds the Tuscan and Composite, both of Italian or Roman origin, and closely dependent upon the original three, Sir William Chambers remarks: “The ingenuity of man has hitherto not been able to produce a sixth order, though large premiums have been offered, and numerous attempts been made by men of first-rate talents, to accomplish it. Such is the fettered human imagination, such the scanty store of its ideas, that Doric, Ionic and Corinthian have ever floated uppermost, and all that has been produced amounts to nothing more than different arrangements and combinations of their parts, with some trifling deviations scarcely deserving notice; the whole tending generally more to diminish than to increase the beauty of the ancient orders.... The suppression of parts of the ancient orders, with a view to produce novelty, has of late years been practised among us with full as little success; and although it is not wished to restrain sallies of imagination, nor to discourage genius from attempting to invent, yet it is apprehended that attempts to alter the primary forms invented by the ancients, and established by the concurring approbation of many ages, must ever be attended with dangerous consequences, must always be difficult, and seldom, if ever, successful.” Thus is seen the marvellous discretion and judgment exercised by the Grecian architects in selecting from contemporary art that alone which was best to perpetuate, and thus is well expressed in the statement of indisputable fact, a tribute to their originality and creative genius.