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"This influence has worked not only in the peculiar styles which have separately been adopted in different countries, but in the general and essential principles of the science. The materials of which buildings in all ages have been chiefly constructed are stone, wood, and factitious substances, as tiles and bricks. The first adoption of these materials, and of course the style of building, must have been recommended by the resources of the country. The law however which determines their arrangement is universal, arising from exigencies over which taste and even ingenuity exert limited control. This evidently arises from the nature of the case, for, since a mass of stone is heavier in all, and weaker in most positions than timber of equal dimensions, the whole congeries of supporting and supported members, that is, the whole system of architecture, will be affected as the one or the other material is employed. Thus in wooden erections the supporting members may be much fewer and less massive than in structures of stone, because, in the former, the horizontal or supported parts are both higher, and will carry the incumbent weight, as a roof, over a much wider interval than in the latter. It is apparent also, even for the ordinary purposes of stability, that in constructing edifices of stone, whether of the perpendicular or horizontal members, the dimensions will be greater than in elevations of wood, and, in the case of columnar structures, that the altitude in proportion to the diameter will be far less in stone than in similar supports. Hence the two grand characteristics of a massive or solemn, and a light or airy architecture. Hence also when genius and taste had begun to consider the arrangements of necessity and use in the relations of effect and beauty, new combinations would be effected which approached to one or other of those leading divisions. It must however be obvious that the field of these experiments is narrowed by the very principles on which they would be first suggested. In the art we are now considering, the human agent has less power over the inert-