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The first monuments were simple masses of rock, "which the iron had not touched," as Moses says Architecture began like all writing It was first an alphabet Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the same moment, on the surface of the entire world We find the "standing stones" of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in the pampas of America

Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they coupled those syllables of granite, and attempted some combinations The Celtic dolal, are words Some, especially the tureat deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase The immense pile of Karnac is a complete sentence

At last they ht forth symbols, beneath which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree beneath its foliage; all these syrow, to multiply, to intersect, to becoer sufficed to contain the in every part; these monuments hardly expressed now the primitive tradition, simple like themselves, naked and prone upon the earth The symbol felt the need of expansion in the edifice Then architecture was developed in proportion with huiant with a thousand heads and a thousand ar symbolism in an eternal, visible, palpable form While Daedalus, who is force, ;--the pillar, which is a letter; the arcade, which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word,--all set in eorouped theamated, descended, ascended, placed theed themselves in stories in the sky, until they had written under the dictation of the general idea of an epoch, those oda of Eklinga, the Rha idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of all these edifices, but also in the form The te of the holy book; it was the holy book itself On each one of its concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and manifested to the eye, and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, until they seized it in its last tabernacle, under its ed to architecture: the arch Thus the as enclosed in an edifice, but its ie was upon its envelope, like the human form on the coffin of a mummy