The building accounts have been preserved in the account-book treasured in the College archives: in it is recorded "every item of stone, wood, or metal used, and every workman's name and weekly wages," an important contribution to the history of prices. The architect was William Arnold, who combined in himself, as did architects in the middle ages and later, the functions of head workman, master mason, architect, and clerk of works in one--a master builder. The stones came from the quarries at Headington and Shotover; the slates from Stonesfield and Burford. Part of the beauty of the College is due to the soft colouring of the silver-grey stone, honeycombed and crumbled, on the south and west especially, where sun and wind and rain beat on it, giving it the appearance of indefinite antiquity; an appearance due, alas! also to the fact that stone from Headington is very friable, and little able to resist the Oxford air. One of the true College stories runs to the effect that Warden Griffiths used the account-book to refute the contention of a great historian of British architecture that Wadham College must have been built at different dates, because its architecture is of different styles--an improper combination of Jacobean and Perpendicular. Dr Griffiths was the kindliest of men, but the most accurate, and it gave him, for he was human, great pleasure to correct mistakes. He listened silently to the great man's argument: next morning, at a large breakfast party given in the College Common Room to the members of the British Association which met at Oxford in the year 1847, he quietly laid the Account-Book beside the plate of the unhappy dogmatist. The fact that the Chapel is Perpendicular while the Quadrangle is late Gothic has been explained by the late Mr J. H. Parker's reasonable, perhaps fanciful, suggestion that "the architect desired to emphasise by this variation of style the religious and secular uses of the several structures."[1] Wadham has been described by Ayliffe, and without much protest, as being "in respect of beauty the most regular and uniform of any in the University." It is the best specimen of that late Gothic style which makes the charm of Oxford, and which Mr Jackson has helped to preserve by his work there and elsewhere.