For a while it seemed as if the Gothic revival might give the prevailing cast to nineteenth-century building; for if this mode was adopted at first because it was picturesque and historic it was later reënforced by the conviction that it was a natural and scientific mode of construction, that it stood for growth and function, as against the arbitrary character of the classic work. The symbols of the organic world were rife in the thought of this period, for in the sphere of thought biology was supplanting physics, and Gothic architecture was supposed peculiarly to be in the line of growth, while that of the Renaissance cut across and, heretically, denied the principle of organic development. Unfortunately the process of disintegration had gone so far that no one current of thought had the power to dominate; and the Gothic style proved to be only the first of a number of discordant influences, derived from industry, from history, from archæology. Indeed, the chief sign that bears witness to the disintegration of architecture during the formative days of the pioneer is eclecticism; but there is still another--the attempt to justify the industrial process by using solely the materials it had created in abundance. In discussing the plans for the Smithsonian Institution, Robert Dale Owen observed that “of late years a rival material, from the mine, seems encroaching on these [stone, clay, wood] and the next generation may see, arising on our continent, villages, or it may be cities, of iron.” What Owen’s generation actually did see, apart from sheet-iron façades and zinc cornices, was the Crystal Palace, which was built in New York in 1853 in imitation of London’s exhibition hall of 1850. Ruskin described the original Crystal Palace, with sardonic justice, as a magnified conservatory; and that is about all that can be said for either building. As exercises in technique they doubtless taught many lessons to the iron masters and engineers; but they had scarcely anything to contribute to architecture. A later generation built the train sheds for their smoky railways on this pattern; but the precedent lingers today chiefly in subway kiosks and window-fronts, and even here it has created no fresh forms for itself--unless the blank expanse of a plate-glass window framed in metallic grilles can be called a fresh form. The growth of eclecticism, on the other hand, had by the middle of the century given the American city the aspect of a museum and the American countryside a touch of the picture-book. Washington Irving’s Sunnyside and the first Smithsonian building were in the predominant Gothic mode; but Poe described the mansion of a not altogether imaginary Arnheim as semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic; and the old Tombs prison in New York got its name from the Egyptian character of its façade. Who can doubt that the design for a _Byzantine_ cottage, shown in The American Cottage Builder (1854), was somewhere carried out?