remarks which had been made about terra cotta, that was not a subject which came under the notice of the Committee, and therefore they paid no attention to it, but he could very well understand that terra cotta would vary extremely according to its composition, and the mode in which it was burned or baked. It came, when properly made, so near to perfect brick, that it appeared almost impossible for it to fail. Of course it was much more easy to ascertain the durability of a natural material than an artificial one. The natural material was exposed in quarries, and in sections, and that gave them an opportunity of observing the effect of exposure to the atmosphere, whereas time only would allow them to come to anything like a sound conclusion as to artificial stone.

Mr. BLASHFIELD, Contributing Visitor, said that this was a subject which had interested him very much, and perhaps he might be allowed to say a few words upon it. It was one which had often engaged his attention in former years, especially in connection with concretes and cements. There was

a house, he believed, in Park Street, which the late Marquis of Normandy lived in, and which was built of concrete blocks, formed of shingle, sand and Mulgrave cement, and designed by the late Mr. Atkinson The blocks had great sharpness, and there was really but very little the matter with the house. He always looked at it whenever he passed, and he regarded it as being the best specimen of that sort of work in London. It was suggested to him that he should make some of those blocks, and he set to work, and had some made out of an iron mould. The mould was two feet by two feet, and by putting in some iron plates he got ten or twelve different forms from the same mould. He tried several compositions, and in the first place used Roman cement, broken tiles, and coarse sand, but he found that was rather costly. He then took ballast and broken bricks from the brick-field, and certainly this was stronger and less costly. He mixed very hard broken bricks, or burrs reduced to a small size, about half an inch, with Roman cement and sand. He forgot now the exact measure, for he was speaking of work which was done five and twenty years ago. This composition was strong. Those experiments led him to apply to Mr. Petty, of Leghorn, for some Italian pozzolana, which he used with lime and sand, and with sand and Roman cement, and the concrete blocks so made became very hard. The blocks made of Roman cement, pozzolana, lime and sand were soon ready for use. Those made of lime, sand, and pozzolana were longer setting, but eventually became the strongest. To these combinations of Roman cement, sand and pozzolana, and lime, sand and pozzolana, he added pot-sherds such as Pliny relates the Romans mixed with their mortar, and he considered that increased toughness was obtained by this addition. He had a house built of blocks made of pot-sherds, sand, and Roman cement, at Northfleet, and Mr. Bevan, the banker, had four small alms-houses built in the same way with this same concrete. The trouble was very great in fitting the door-ways and sash-frames, and other matters; and in making the courses he took the trouble of having a drawing for each course, so that all the blocks were very carefully arranged for bonding. Altogether the matter was so troublesome, that upon going into it with an architect, he found that it would be much dearer than building in the ordinary way. He had one of the pozzolana concrete blocks kept under water for two years, and its hardness was very great. The late Mr. Walker, the engineer, showed him specimens of Dutch terras, which had been used in the Woolwich dockyard in the reign of George the Third, and which were of very great hardness-in fact, he was told that in breaking up the dock where it was used, the workmen were obliged to have resort to gunpowder. Messrs. Walker and Burgess were employed on the embankment in front of the New Houses of Parliament, with whom he had a long conversation on the subject of pozzolana. Mr. Walker used pozzolana, lime, and sand for the concrete and mortar in that work, and he knew it to be a most excellent material, and from enquiries which he had made, he believed this mortar cost about £1. a ton. Two measures of sand, one of pozzolana, and one of lime, were considered good proportions to make a very excellent concrete. Mr. Lee used a very fine concrete made of Portland cement, Portland stone chippings, sand, and shingle, in great blocks,

16 feet and more cube, made in moulds, for the breakwater at Dover. He made some experiments for this work with the Lancashire terras, mixed with broken tiles and sand; but it was not deemed equal in hardness to the Portland cement concrete blocks, and it was abandoned, though Sir John Rennie gave it some very fair tests in some of his works. With regard to the manufacture of terra cotta, he could not say that he was a very old manufacturer, for he had only begun it about the year 1851. He had had the acquaintance of the late Mr. Herbert Minton for some years before that, and when that gentleman began making buttons, he suggested to him the idea of making tesserae for pavements, which he had tried to make from marble and other substances. The knowledge of pottery he obtained through Mr. Minton's experiments upon pavements, and other works, showed him that what was called "terra cotta" was an imperfect thing for the atmosphere of London, and that terra cotta, as generally used, was nothing more than baked clay with a little sand, and a few broken potsherds, and that to make a hard material like Mr. Minton's tiles, it was necessary to use other matters. He had tried to make something of that kind, and had at the commencement made after great labour and expenditure, some of the mistakes which Mr. Smith had described. He had sometimes made things two inches longer than others, with the same quantity of water, clay, and sand, and burnt in the same kiln, and it was only in experiments carried on during several years, that he had been able to arrive at any approximation to perfection. Since Christmas he had made at least 4,000 balusters from patterns, and about 400 keystones of different sizes, and he would venture to say that these had not varied a quarter of an inch. Part of these works had been executed for a very large public building, and an architect had visited the works and given a certificate for every payment which he had received, after a careful inspection of the terra cotta. He did not say that everything was perfect, but on a very large work, comprising some 10,000 pieces, his loss had not been five per cent.

Mr. T. HAYTER LEWIS, Fellow, was most anxious that the meeting should not separate without giving the due meed of honour to Mr. Dines, Mr. White, Mr. Burnell, and Mr. Papworth for the very great kindness and attention which they had shown throughout the whole course of the experiments. Mr. Hansard's name had been brought forward by Professor Kerr in his original motion, and therefore he (Mr. Lewis) could not include him. Nevertheless, he was bound to say that Mr. Hansard had been most unwearied in his attention to the subject, and had devoted a vast amount of time to it, and the Institute would be wanting in gratitude and respect both to him and to the other gentlemen whom he had named, and to themselves, if they omitted to vote the resolution which he had proposed. At that late period of the meeting he would say no more as to the result of the experiments than to call the attention of the meeting to the results of the crushing of the cylinders of stone and marble then exhihited. It would be seen that the whole of them had crushed in the direction of the length, whichever way was the direction of the bed; and these results agreed very strikingly with the results of the experiments which had been made by Mr. Hodgkinson on the breaking of iron columns, and which had been published some few years ago in the "Transactions of the Society of Civil Engineers." When iron was first brought into use, they used to have the most horrible forms of columns possible, swelled out in the centre in a sort of fish-bellied form, because it was considered that columns would break by bending, and that they needed, therefore, to be strengthened in the middle. Within very narrow limits this might possibly be the case, but not with the size of which columns were usually made; and as nothing more horrible could scarcely be conceived than the above form, it was satisfactory to find from Mr. Hodgkinson's experiments that it was not the best for strength. The experiments now reported on by the Committee proved this also in a very striking way. It was a most important point, and clearly proved that the old form of cylinders were practically the strongest as well as the most graceful. He would now propose a vote of thanks to the gentlemen whom he had mentioned. K K

ON CERTAIN EARLY ROMANESQUE BUILDINGS IN SWITZERLAND AND THE NEIGHBOURING COUNTRIES.

By EDWARD A. FREEMAN, Hon. Member.

Read at the Ordinary General Meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects, June 13th, 1864.

My object in the present paper, as in a lecture on a kindred subject which I gave last year before the Architectural and Historical Society at Oxford, is rather to stimulate curiosity than to gratify it. I find myself on the edge of a very large subject, of which I have advanced very little beyond the edge. It is by no means likely that I shall myself ever go very much further; but I flatter myself that various circumstances have put it in my power to give some useful hints to those who may be inclined to follow up the subject more minutely. This is what I attempted to do last year at Oxford with regard to the architecture of Switzerland generally. I recommended it as a branch of architectural study which presented much that was attractive in many ways, but which had hitherto been almost wholly neglected. I pointed out the only way in which the subject could be successfully studied, and I started several questions as having occurred to me which I by no means pretended to answer myself. I believe that this is the best service which can be done by one who opens what is practically a new subject. It is dangerous to dogmatize on a first sight of anything; but to an observer who has his eyes open the first sight of anything is sure to suggest subjects of inquiry, which, whatever may be the results finally reached, cannot fail to be useful both to himself and to others. What I did last year at Oxford with regard to the general subject of the ancient architecture of the countries forming the present Swiss Confederation, I propose to do now with regard to one particular branch of it which specially attracted me on a second visit this year. This is the early Romanesque architecture of Switzerland, looked at as a contribution to the general study of comparative architecture. I propose to mention several buildings which greatly struck me, but I do not profess to give a minute antiquarian account of any one of them. I propose to point out several lines of inquiry which they suggest, but I have to confess that, so far from having myself exhausted them, I have hardly entered upon any of them. I shall venture to mention a general conclusion to which such facts as I have observed seem to me to point; but I shall put it forth only as an idea floating in my own mind, ready to be confirmed or refuted by future inquiries, by no means as a decided conclusion which I am anxious to thrust down the throats of others, or even as one which I am prepared dogmatically to defend.

The idea for I can hardly venture to call it a conviction—which is thus suggested to me by what I have seen in several parts of Western Europe amounts to this. It strikes me that, before the later forms of Romanesque with which most of us are familiar, the Norman of England and Northern France, the peculiar Romanesque of Germany, the peculiar Romanesque of Aquitaine, and any other national or local varieties which any other observer may wish to establish, there was an earlier form of Romanesque spread generally over Western Europe, more directly imitated from Italian models, and differing less widely in different countries, than the varieties of Romanesque which followed it. It strikes me further, that in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this common style was generally supplanted by local styles which each country developed for itself. Again, it would seem that this common style survived longer and attained a higher development in some countries than in others; that in some countries the later Romanesque of the district was developed out of it, while in others a later form of Romanesque violently supplanted it. It would follow then that in some countries we may expect to L L

find buildings of this sort of some size and pretension, while in others we are driven to patch up our notices of the early style from small and rude fragments here and there. A large and highly-finished building of the twelfth century in one country may be the true congener, not of its contemporary large and highly-finished building elsewhere, but of some obscure little building in some out-of-the-way corner, which nothing but its poverty and obscurity has preserved from destruction.

This is then the view which I have been inclined to all along, and which what I have seen in Switzerland has gone far to strengthen, but I throw it out only as something to be tested or sifted either by myself or by anybody else. I would strongly recommend it as a subject to be fully worked out by some of those who have more time for such inquiries than I, that is, by some of those in whose historical researches architecture holds the first place. With me, I need hardly say, architecture is but a secondary pursuit, something more indeed than a mere amusement, but still a study quite subordinate to others. Above all, in Switzerland, where the political problems of the present and the past necessarily absorb almost every thought, where the present has grown out of the past instead of being substituted for it, where the life of old Greece, of medieval Europe, and of our own times, all live together in such strange and wonderful harmony, it is only a very secondary care that the historical inquirer can afford to give to the architectural monuments of the country. In the land of bondage one turns to the contemplation of the ancient glories of Toulouse or Alby as a pleasing relief from the dreariness of the present; in the land of freedom one can hardly find time to examine a castle or a minster when one has a chance of beholding a Landesgemeinde. But I must give an emphatic warning to any one whom I may induce to enter on the subject. The study of architecture and the study of political history must go hand in hand. The student may determine at pleasure which he will make primary and which secondary, but if he wishes to understand either worthily, he must not be wholly ignorant of the other. A man who is wholly ignorant of history may doubtless both put together a building, and put together æsthetical theories about it, but he can know nothing of the real history of his art unless he studies it in connexion with other branches of history. Again, I do not hesitate to say that the man who studies general history without paying any regard to the history of architecture leaves out one important portion of his subject. The architecture of a country is as much a part of the national life of a people, and is therefore as much entitled to a place in its history, as its laws, its language, its military discipline, or its social habits. I do not say that all of these branches are of equal importance, but I do say that each of them is of some importance, and that he who leaves out any one of them, be it architecture or any other, leaves out an essential part of what he professes to learn. And I must repeat, what I have often said before in other forms, and what is of especial moment in everything which concerns the history of Switzerland, that he who would make himself master of architectural history, or of political history, or of any other branch of history, must, first of all, thoroughly emancipate himself from all bondage to the modern map. In studying any building or class of buildings, he must remember what were the political divisions of Europe at the time when those buildings were erected. It would be invidious to mention here the ludicrous blunders into which even really distinguished men have fallen through neglect of this caution. We must remember that medieval architecture knows nothing of a France that touches the Rhine, that Romanesque architecture knows nothing of a France that touches the Alps or the Pyrenees. From forgetting this, when people find the national architecture of Germany, Burgundy, and Aquitaine within the limits of modern France, they either set it down as French, or else wonder at finding within France architecture which their own eyes tell them is not French. They forget that the lands of which I speak are French in no sense except in that of having been seized by France for the most part long after their principal buildings were built. Thus in Aquitaine, the Romanesque buildings are all purely national; in the Gothic period we find national and