Against this may be urged the very argument with which we set out, that a nation's architecture should be the exponent of its national character, and as we are made up of every people and every class, that this heterogeneous _melange_ is our normal style. But mark the distinction: Although we are made up of so many diverse elements, yet the component parts are severally and mutually held in solution. Each so affects the mass as to give rise to a new element--not a mere union, but a result--not an addition, but a multiplication. But with the representative art, the materials have merely come in contact--nothing more. Our houses lack that social element which characterizes our people. Each is itself, and itself alone, ruining the appearance of its neighbors, and ruined by them in turn. _Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo_, is the only law; while we are a chemical solution, our architecture is only a mechanical one. How proceed, then, to develop our national style, that unborn something which a future age might refer to as American, just as we speak of Byzantine or Gothic? Are we waiting for somebody to invent it? We think, maybe, that it is to spring forth, ready made, like Minerva from the brain of Zeus. If this is our idea, we might as well give up at once and confess to the world our imbecility. Never, from Adam's day to this, did anybody ever invent a new architecture. It is purely a matter of genealogy. For just as we trace back a family line, can we trace the generations of art. Spite of its complications, many an offshoot can be followed up directly to the parent stock. Taking, for example, the mediaeval architecture of Spain, the brilliant 'Moresco,' we find it to be a combination of the vigorous Gothic of the North with the beautiful though effeminate Saracenic--the exotic of the South. And of these latter, each is traceable, though by different lines, to the same great prototype, the Roman. For when Rome was divided, the Dome fell to the inheritance of the Eastern Empire, and the Basilica (which was only a Greek temple turned inside out) to the Western. The former, joined to the Arabian, and the latter to the Gothic, formed two great families, from the union of whose descendants sprang the Moresco. But even the Roman was a derivative style, leading us back successively through Greece, Assyria, and Egypt. Each step is visibly allied to the preceding, and yet how unlike the pyramid and the Spanish cathedral! Did history permit, all the styles that have ever existed could be traced in the same way; it is quite as easy to account for their diversities, as for those of the nations that produced them. Ham and Japheth were of the same household, yet how different their descendants of to-day! As from one man sprang all people, so was there an original germ of architecture from which all successive styles have been derived.