know the Germanic sword-blades of the Migrations with their Oriental ornamentation, and the Mycenæan strongholds with their Minoan artistry. It is the distinction between blood and sense, race and speech, _politics and religion_. There is, in fact, as yet no world-history of the House and its Races, and to give us such a history should be one of the most urgent tasks of the researcher. But we must work with means quite other than those of art-history. The peasant dwelling is, as compared with the tempo of all _art_-history, something constant and “eternal” like the peasant himself. It stands outside the Culture and therefore outside the higher history of man; it recognizes neither the temporal nor the spacial limits of this history and it maintains itself, unaltered ideally, throughout all the changes of architecture, which it witnesses, but in which it does not participate. The round hut of ancient Italy is still found in Imperial times.[168] The form of the Roman rectangular house, the existence-mark of a second race, is found in Pompeii and even in the Imperial palaces. Every sort of ornament and style was borrowed from the Orient, but no Roman would ever think of imitating the Syrian house,[169] any more than the Hellenistic city-architect tampered with the megaron form of Mycenæ and Tiryns and the old Greek peasant-house described by Galen. The Saxon and Franconian peasant-house kept its essential nucleus unimpaired right from the country farm, through the burgher-house of the old Free Cities, up to the patrician buildings of the eighteenth century, while Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Empire styles glided over it one after the other, clothing it from cellar to garret with _their_ essences, but never perverting the Soul of the House. And the same is true of the furniture-forms, in which we have to distinguish carefully the psychological from the artistic treatment. In particular, the evolution of the Northern seat-furniture is, right up to the club arm-chair, a piece of race-history and not of what is called style-history. Every other character can deceive us as to the fortunes of race--the Etruscan names amongst the “Sea-folk” defeated by Rameses III, the enigmatic inscription of Lemnos, the wall-paintings in the tombs of Etruria, afford no sure evidences of the bodily connexion of these men. Although towards the end of the Stone Age a telling ornamentation arose and continued in the vast region east of the Carpathians, it is perfectly possible that race superseded race there. If we possessed in western Europe only pottery remains for the centuries between Trojan and Chlodwig, we should not have the least inkling of the event that we know as the “great Migrations.” But the presence of an oval house in the Ægean region[170] and of another and very striking example of it in Rhodesia,[171] and the much-discussed concordance of the Saxon peasant-house with that of the Libyan Kabyle disclose a piece of race-history. Ornaments spread when