Excerpt from The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal, Scientific and Railway Gazette, 1847, Vol. 10 It is by no means to be inferred that the introduction of the arch was prejudicial to the art. On the contrary, every new contrivance by which construction is facilitated ought to be looked upon as a direct benefit to architecture for the most liberal and elevated views of an art are those which encourage its extension by every available means. The injurious effects complained of by Hope arose, not from the invention of the arch abstractedly considered, but from the inju dioicus application of it. It had rendered almost all the Greek forms unnecessary; they ought therefore to have been unreservedly aban doned in arcuate building, or at least those of them alone should have been retained which were necessarily common to the two modes of construction. The pediment was appropriate and had meaning where what Hope a'ptly terms the spine of the roof (that is, the line formed by the two inclined planes intersecting at their vertical angle) was continued throughout the building from end to end. Where, however, the roof was flat, or surmounted by a horizontal entablature, as in Roman, and subsequently in Lombardic, architecture, or where the structure was crowned by a ponderous attic, as in the case of St. Peter's, and numerous modern English buildings to which it is unnecessary to specify, it is clear that the pediment could have no real constructive use. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.