with the same remuneration for their work as the apprentice just out of his time, and merely seek to get into a wholesale business. This greatly helps to degrade the profession in the eyes of the public, and gives a very wrong impression of the facts, as every architect well knows. Thousands of public monuments have been erected in Europe since the Golden Age of Greece, not to speak of important private buildings; yet the Parthenon and the Caryatid Temple on the Erectheion have never been equalled since, nor the interior of the Pantheon, nor the west front of Notre-Dame at Paris, nor the Cornaro-Spinelli Palace, nor the Scuola di San Marco, nor the Town Hall of Brescia. In all the other fine arts the first successful effort brings its author next to nothing, but those produced in the height of his skill and knowledge mostly bring him wealth, if that be his desire. The great Diogenes was a beggar, and Jean François Millet, the one artist in Europe according to the Japanese, was in poverty; and so was Alfred Stevens. Every architect knows that in the case of architectural works of moderate size it is a question if he is to gain or lose a five-pound note; and the more care he takes, the more certainly is the balance on the wrong side. The fashionable architect with a hundred buildings has a difficulty in persuading the profession or the public that he bestows the same loving care on each of his hundred buildings that he would do if he had only two, and is apt to provoke the retort of the lioness to the beasts in Esop's Fables. "There was a great stir made among all the beasts, which could boast of the largest family. So they came to the lioness: And how many,' said they, 'do you have at a birth?' 'One,' said she grimly; 'but that one is a lion.'" I cannot help desiring to see the pursuit of architecture followed on sound principles, nor can I forget the absence of any system in my youth; for then, after you had drawn out examples of the Greek and Roman orders, genius was supposed to do the rest. I am delighted at the admiration of our smaller domestic architecture by our great morning newspaper, The Times, and by M. Paul Sédille in his L'Architecture Moderne en Angleterre; but I wish to see that admiration extended to our great public buildings as well. One sees to what lengths a proper architectural education may lead from mere savagery in the architectural triumphs of the Middle Ages. If the true architectural high road could be again found all might hasten to the goal, and not be like the dragon's teeth when the stones were thrown into the middle of them. Who knows that in the case of the right road being found the public might not again take a passionate interest in the excellence of our art, as it must have done at the great epochs ? Modesty is a charming virtue in all, and especially in those of great intellectual endowments; but if this modesty is only to make us idle and worthless, let us throw it off. Let us no longer say we are so inferior to the ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Saracen, Mediæval, and Renaissance architects that it is no use trying to equal them. Have we relinquished the courage, daring, and self-reliance that once distinguished our race? If we have we must be contented to lag behind the rest of the world. If we are not equal to former races, and particularly to the Romans we so much resemble, I believe it is because we have got into a wrong road, and I would rather see architects take up the position of our Ambassador at the Court of the father of Frederick the Great than be ready to confess that the English are hopelessly inferior to the great architectural races. Frederick William, as you know, had a regiment of giants, and paraded them in front of our Ambassador, and asked him if he thought an equal number of Englishmen could beat them. The Ambassador said he could not say that, but he would undertake that half the number would try. I hope we are not worse than the men of Milton's days, and hear what he says of them: "Lords and commons of England! consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit; acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of learning in her deepest sciences have been so ancient, and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity and able judgment have been persuaded that even the school of Pythagoras, and the Persian wisdom, took beginning from the old philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius Agricola, who governed once here for Cæsar, preferred the natural wits of Britain before the laboured studies of the French." I firmly believe that the race has not degraded, and that if we will only again take up the right way of learning we shall astonish ourselves and the world. May I not say— "Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new: That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do: "? To those who are not architects I may say that if you will devote yourselves solely to money-making and feasting, architecture which mirrors the condition of nations at the time. it is executed will certainly languish; for the admiration it should excite and the gratitude it should call forth is the very breath of its nostrils. It cannot, however, be said of the nation now that it is without aspirations, for there never was a time when so many were striving to penetrate the secrets of Nature, and the past acts and thoughts of man, and trying to yoke the powers of Nature for man's use, and to teach and elevate their fellow-man and his helpmeet. To women more liberty has been granted than Mary Wollstonecraft asked for, and they have achieved even more than she hoped for. But all these studies and pursuits rather throw our contemporaries off those primary delights that Nature gave to raise, to solace, and to purify mankind-I mean the beauties of form and colour and the impressiveness of light and shade. But if these lessons be neglected, we shall leave behind us but a poor account of ourselves in those arts which strike the eye and impress the imagination. We have, too, unfortunately abandoned the symbolic, the emblematic, and the allegorical, so that we can tell no story to the eye by which the multitude may be impressed. It is foolishly believed that a paragraph in a newspaper or in an Act of Parliament will tell the same story and make the same impression on the multitude that can be made by a fine building adorned with storied and allegorical sculpture, and painting such as we see in the Arch of Titus or Severus. The Jubilee procession, poor as it was as compared with Mantegna's "Triumph of Julius Cæsar," told more of our power and extent of empire than all the history that has been written in this century. Recollect what an obtrusive art architecture is, and how strongly it forces itself on the attention; how long it lasts, and how it forces people to come to see it in its own country. If you would only think that it is the history of the present power and cultivation of the people, you would at least learn enough about architecture to be able to judge of its excellence as you do about the other fine arts you love, and be as proud of its excellence and as delighted with it as you are with the pictures, statues, poetry, romances, and musical compositions of the day; and when you do take the same interest in it you will certainly have your reward. VOTE OF THANKS TO THE PRESIDENT. MR. H. HEATHCOTE STATHAM [F.].-Ladies and Gentlemen, in rising to propose a vote of thanks to the President for his Address, perhaps I may suitably address myself rather to the House. than to the Chair, and I am sure I shall carry the House with me in saying that it is very seldom that we have listened to a Presidential Address from this Chair which contains so much weighty and important thought upon the art and profession of architecture comprised in such comparatively short limits. It appears to me that the Address has in view two main objects: it touches upon what this Institute can do, and it touches in the broader sense upon what can be expected and what can be done by modern architecture. In regard to what the Institute can do, the President puts very strikingly the true object of the examinatiou. of architects, as to the value and use of which there has been a good deal of controversy; but he puts the Examinations as having rather a preventive value. We do not want people in the profession of architecture who do not care for it, and do not wish to do the best with it; we are sentinels to drive such away, and to keep with us those who really love it and mean to put the best of their hearts into it. Then the President refers to what a student of architecture is advised to do to sketch in perspective, and sketch everything that is beautiful. That reminds me of a feeling I have often had that a good deal of the practice of sketching as it is carried on by an architectural student is not without its danger-that is to say, that if you come to sketching everything you see, you get a sort of love for it, and you get a passion for introducing it somewhere; and, as the President says, the public wanting you to introduce every known style, you fill your pocket-book with sketches of every style. I would suggest that the measuring and drawing out of ancient construction is a far more important training to young architects than the sketching of exteriors of ancient buildings, and more likely to lead them in the right way. With regard to the difficult subject of the Fellowship of the Institute, my own sympathy is with the opinion of the President, but I cannot conceal from myself the other argument, that this is to some extent a professional society for assisting each other's interests where it is right; and I think it is a point which cannot be disposed of in a moment. With regard to architectural education, the President seemed to cast a slur upon the literary part of the Examinations when he said it was very well to know a number of languages, but they are not architecture. No, they are not: but it is just as well an architect should not write that his building is designed in the style of the fourteenth "centuary," which I have had twice from architects in large practice. Architects should be a well-educated body; they are then more likely to be regarded with respect by the public. Coming to the larger question, what architecture is and how we can improve it, there are one or two points upon which I do not quite feel with the President. In regard to the matter of statics, which will give us important lessons as to the height of a building, the weight to be carried, the kind of material to be used, and that we have only to accentuate the important parts by moulding, &c., so as to make it effective-I would ask, Is not the plan of a building the central idea, after all? Is not that part of the artistic idea? We have, I think, a very fine example of that in what I have always considered to be our greatest modern building-namely, the Houses of Parliament. It is easy to say that the detail of the Houses of Parliament is only a repetition of Late Gothic detail. So it is; that is what was thought right at the time. But does not the real excellence of it consist in the grand conception of the plan and the grouping of the two towers and the central spire? I think the central idea is the plan, and that that is really a form of art just as much as the detail of the building. Then the President has always had a very strong idea as to the importance of giving our minds to the treatment of new materials, especially iron. I should like to suggest one thing. It is a very complete way of putting it to say that the Egyptians had a granite architecture, the Greeks had a marble architecture, the Medieval architects had a stone architecture, and we have got iron; but, after all, do not all those ancient materialsgranite, marble, stone-belong to the same family? They are all natural materials. Iron cannot be put quite upon the same footing with them. It is to some extent an artificial material, artificially prepared; moreover, it has to be painted, in order to preserve it from the weather, which stone has not. Then I do not think you can get with iron anything like the broad expression that can be got from the stone materials. Try it in modern work. Suppose a client wants you to build him a mansion in the middle of his ancestral park, amid his old oak trees, and suppose you offer to build it for him in the most advanced construction of iron and concrete, do you not think you would get from your client what the people in the little comedy, The Two Roses, got from their patron, "a littlecheck," spelt the wrong way? Then, again, is iron a monumental material? We do not know that yet. I remember asking the engineer of one of the greatest iron constructions of this century how long a life he would give it. " Well," he said very cautiously, "with proper care I do not see why it should not last five centuries." Proper care meant painting it every five years, strengthening it, replacing all the loose rivets, and so on. But, after all, what is five centuries to architecture? Look at the Pantheon, look at St. Sophia, and, if you put aside the destructive work of man, you might say, look at the Parthenon: for it is only owing to the zeal of the Byzantine Christian and the bombshells of the "unspeakable Turk" that the Parthenon is not at this moment what a stage-manager would call "a practicable temple." Then when people say that these great engineering works, like the Forth Bridge, are the great modern works; that they are to this age what the cathedrals were to the fourteenth century--well, after all, though these works are striking and grand in a way, they are not built with the object of being beautiful. The cathedrals were, and that is a most important difference. I maintain that we must hold strongly to the idea that architecture, although it is based, as the President reminded us, on construction, has for its real object the producing of beauty appealing to our imagination, and that you cannot compare it in that way with works which are built from purely utilitarian motives. To come to the present day, and the chances we have of producing anything great, I sometimes think that this so-called nineteenth century" is a little too much abused. It reminds me of a story of a Roman Catholic Bishop on a visitation. In one of the churches he went to, he thought the people looked depressed and melan C choly, and in the privacy of the vestry he said, "Father So-and-So, do you know, I think ye curse these people too much." So I think we curse the nineteenth century too much. A century hence, I think this period will be seen to have been not a mean or small, but a very remarkable era, which has led to a great many new forms of thought, to an enormous advance in science and in a knowledge of the laws of Nature, and to have been a great literary era; but it certainly has not been a great architectural era. Perhaps we may be obliged to conclude that we cannot do everything at once; but I have no sympathy with those people, like the late William Morris (I do not speak with any disrespect of him, but he was a pessimist with regard to architecture), who keep repeating, "Architecture is deadarchitecture is dead." What is the use of standing with your hands in your pockets and saying, "Architecture is dead"? Why not try to make it live? If architects would only give their minds to each problem that comes before them; if, instead of trying to lay hold of the details of some past style, they would think, "What have we got to express in this-how can we make it a symbol of something?" they would find themselves really accomplishing something, and more perhaps than they expected. In the words of the French sculptor Rude, which I quoted the other day in a communication to the JOURNAL, "La grande chose pour un artiste, c'est de faire"-to be producing something. And I think, if we keep that before us, if we look upon architecture as a symbolism of what we desire the building to express, instead of going to the past for symbols, and try to make out of it what we really care for ourselves, we shall be able to do something something perhaps not so elaborate as the Renaissance of Classic or Gothic, but something which will illustrate the exhortation given by the poet : "Oh thou sculptor, painter, poet,* MR. ALEX. MURRAY [H.A.], LL.D., F.S.A. : Ladies and gentlemen, in seconding the Vote of Thanks to the President, I may express the opinion of many if I say that upon the question which he has chosen for his Address, viz. "The Education of Architects," no one is better entitled to be listened to than he, with his long experience, his habit of observation and reflection, and his readiness in recognising greatness in every profession. that part of the Address it would be presumptuous in me to speak. I have no idea of what the Associates' curriculum may be, amended or unamended. As to the final examinations, my experience is that most examinations have a tendency to be final. But the President has accom On * Longfellow would no doubt have been willing to add 'architect," but it would not come into the metre. H. H.S. panied his views on the subject of education with a running commentary, sometimes entertaining, and meant to be so, as in the episode of his schooldays, but mostly leading up to some general remark sententiously expressed and deserving to be treasured. I feel sure that these remarks have struck you all. Let me recall one or two of them. "If you can touch the master chords of humanity, they are not so differently attuned now from what they were in the earliest times." Such is the reflection after advocating strenuously the study of all that is great in the past of architecture. Again: "We believe that Nature perfectly adapts all her living works to the actions they have to perform, without waste of material." How much is expressed by these words," without waste of material," most of us, whether architects or not, know to our cost. But I think the danger of wasting material is perhaps more imminent for architects than others, because of the endless variety of the taste, or want of taste, they have to consult. Or take another instance. I find it difficult to recall to mind a more impressive statement of fact than that which occurred in a sentence at the close of the Address. "Recollect," he said, "what an obtrusive art architecture is, and how strongly it forces itself on the attention: how long it lasts, and how it forces people to come and see it in its own country." It has always been true, and never more so than now, that great architecture forces people to come and see it in its own country. long, tedious, and expensive journey is nothing, if a sight of the Parthenon is the goal. But this readiness to admire the charms of other and older countries must bring with it the aspiration to erect in our own country works which shall, in their turn, keep alive the memory of the men of our own day. It was in urging this that the Address seemed to me most eloquent. We all know the fascination which Greek mouldings exercise on the mind of the President when they are seen in the sunshine of Greece. He has recurred to that subject to night, observing that any one who has seen such mouldings at Athens must recognise how much they lose in our atmosphere. I do not suppose that on that account he would banish them entirely from our shores. Many of us would be sorry if that should happen; because, ineffective as Greek mouldings may be in our climate, they still retain and display much of their unique beauty. I remember one day on the Acropolis of Athens, when a fragment of egg-moulding, high up on one of the corners of the Erechtheum, struck me as if the small row of eggs had become resolved into drops of dew, the sun glancing on them with indescribable beauty. We cannot have startling effects of that kind in this country; but we can live in hope that some architect may yet find an equivalent, inspired by what he has seen in Greece. THE PRESIDENT briefly replied. A There was a very satisfactory muster of membêrs and their friends, including several ladies, at the Opening Meeting on Monday evening. Among members present was Sir John Taylor [F], who in the recent distribution of Jubilee honours was made a K.C.B., and whom the President took opportunity early in the proceedings of felicitating upon his new honours, and expressing the satisfaction felt by members that one of their number had been thus distinguished. The Allied Society at Sheffield was represented by their Hon. Secretary, Mr. C. J. Innocent [F], and among the numerous visitors were Sir Philip Magnus, Mr. Humphry Ward, Dr. Garnett, Mr. J. A. Bennion, Mr. T. Armstrong (of the Science and Art Department), and Mr. H. Muthesius, architect to the German Embassy in London. The President and subsequent speakers had an attentive and interested audience, duly appreciative of the occasional touches of humour with which the Address was enlivened. The National Photographic Record Association. This Society "has been formed for collecting photographic records of objects and scenes. of interest throughout the British Isles, with a view of depositing them in the British Museum, where they may be safely stored and be accessible to the public under proper regulations." The President is Sir J. Benjamin Stone, M.P., to whom the honour and credit of the conception are due. On the Council are distinguished representatives of the chief learned and photographic societies, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the Science and Art Department. Mr. Alexander Graham [F.] is Treasurer, and Mr. George Scamell [F] is Hon. Secretary. The following remarks, quoted from a circular letter issued by the executive, express the aim and scope of the organisation: The Association having been fairly launched, the elected Council appeal to those who are interested in the subject to assist in bringing together a truly National Photographic Record of all existing objects of interest, as well as scenery, life, customs, and history of the time. Wellwishers can help by becoming members of the Association, the subscription fee for which has been fixed at a small sum with the object of enlisting wide and general support. Photographers and others can assist by contributing photographs (which must comply with the regulations set forth in the bye-laws), or by acting as Hon. Agents and Collectors in their respective localities. The Council look for generous support from Photographic and Camera Clubs throughout the country, as well as from individual amateur photographers, who must now form a complete network of workers over the whole British Islands. The Council also appeal to the large and important professional class of photographers for copies of rare and especially interesting pictures taken by them. From scientists, antiquarians, and others, assistance is desired in searching among the rich stores of old and neglected negatives taken in past years which are known to exist, the identification of which gets more difficult as time passes, and also by using influence with their amateur photographic friends in inducing them to seize opportunities of recording passing events. Others may render valuable help by purchasing pictures from dealers and presenting them to the National Collection, thus rescuing records which might otherwise be lost. In the course of the present Jubilee year there must have been many thousands of photographs taken of local celebrations, which, if brought together, would form a most valuable chapter of national history, and it may be remarked in passing that it should be borne in mind that a single picture of historical interest will always be acceptable. In conclusion the Council wish it to be understood that there is no thought of competing or clashing with the excellent work of the same kind which is being so well done by the several County Photographic Survey Associations, such as those of Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Yorkshire, Cheshire, &c., in their commendable efforts to form local collections, but rather a hope is entertained that such useful work may be encouraged by loans being made from time to time from the National Collection, before being deposited in the British Museum, of interesting pictures from other localities for the purposes of exhibition. It is thus obvious that the Association has embarked on a vast scheme whose importance it is |