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Viewed through the harmonising medium of ages, we are now scarcely impressed with the differences which examination proves to have existed between these styles. Great as those were, to us they have melted into unity, and if it was in the power of the Greeks to so model those diversities as to give them the power of harmonious fusion in the future, may we not hope that, great as the differences may be between the very styles in which we are now accustomed to work, time may so reconcile our varieties of practice as to give an appearance of cohesion and harmony of principle to our system of architectural progression by antagonism?
The fourth section of Greek theory under the heading of Disposition included all the study connected with the placing of the structure and the modes in which the wants of the employer might be supplied so as to take the greatest advantage of the surroundings of his structure. The study of this matter obviously included salubrity, light, air, position, both with regard to health and beauty, and such a convenient arrangement of all apartments as to make them most delightful. Disposition served to dictate which were to be the summer, and which the winter apartments, how those apartments most used should enjoy the loveliest prospects, how the richest apartments should be so placed as to be most and best seen, how due privacy was to be obtained, and yet how the general aspect of the structure might be a delight to those without it, while its internal elaboration was to be a source of constant pleasure to those privileged to remain within it.
In almost all the sections we have yet enumerated reason and utilitarianism appear to dominate over pure esthetic considerations; but in the fifth, Proportion, embracing with it Eurythmia and Symmetry, art assumes its ascendancy.
Under the general considerations of proportion the Greeks, I believe, studied the relative bulk of the parts of which their structures consisted, as the distance apart of