Let me not be supposed, however, by the preceding remarks to restrict their destination to one single purpose. All I require of my readers is a patient perusal of my details; and I deceive myself very much, and overrate my powers of enunciation, else I shall establish in their minds as thorough a conviction of the development of the “Towers” as I am myself satisfied with the accuracy of my conclusions. I shall only entreat, then, of their courtesy that I be not anticipated in my course, or definitively judged of by isolated scraps, but that, as my notice for this competition has been limited and recent, allowing but little time for the observance of _tactique_ or rules, in the utterance of the novel views which I now venture to put forward, the proofs of which, however, have been long registered in my thoughts, and additionally confirmed by every new research, the merits of the production may not be estimated by parcels, but by the combined tendency of the parts altogether. To begin, therefore. The origins I have heard assigned to those records of antiquity,--however invidious it may appear, at this the outset of my labours, to assume so self-sufficient a tone, yet can I not avoid saying that, whether I consider their multiplicity or their extravagance, they have not more frequently excited my ridicule than my commiseration. That specimens of architecture, so costly and so elegant, should be designed for the paltry purposes of purgatorial columns or penitential heights, to which criminals should be elevated for the ablution of their enormities--while the honest citizen, virtuous and unstained, should be content to grovel amongst lowly terrestrials ’mid the dense exhalations of forests and bogs, in a mud-wall hut, or at best a conglomeration of wattles and hurdles--is, I conceive, an outrage upon human reason too palpable to be listened to. Not less ridiculous is the idea of their having been intended for beacons; for, were such their destination, a hill or rising ground would have been the proper site for their erection, and not a valley or low land, where it happens that we generally meet them. The belfry theory alone, unfounded in one sense though it really be, and when confined to that application equally contemptible with the others, is, notwithstanding, free from the objection that would lie against the _place_, as it is well known that the sound of bells which hang in plains and valleys is heard much farther than that of such as hang upon elevations or hills: for, air being the medium of sound, the higher the sonorous body is placed, the more rarefied is that medium, and consequently the less proper vehicle to convey the sound to a distance. The objection of situation, therefore, does not apply to this theory; and, accordingly, we shall find that the exercising of bells--though in a way and for an object little contemplated by our theorists--constituted part of the machinery of the complicated ceremonial of those mysterious edifices.