he country, whose fragmentary character first occasioned the
building and piecing of the large pier, were yet in beds consistent
enough to supply shafts of very small diameter, the strength and
simplicity of such a construction might justify it, as well as its
grace. The fact, however, is that the charm which the multiplication of
line possesses for the eye has always been one of the chief ends of the
work in the grouped schools; and that, so far from employing the grouped
piers in order to the introduction of very slender block shafts, the
most common form in which such piers occur is that of a solid jointed
shaft, each joint being separately cut into the contour of the group
required.

Sec. XX. We have hitherto supposed that all grouped or clustered shafts
have been the result or the expression of an actual gathering and
binding together of detached shafts. This is not, however, always so:
for some clustered shafts are little more than solid piers channelled on
the surface, and their form appears to be merely the development of some
longitudinal furrowing or striation on the original single shaft. That
clustering or striation, whichever we choose to call it, is in this case
a decorative feature, and to be considered under the head of decoration.

Sec. XXI. It must be evident to the reader at a glance, that the real
serviceableness of any of these grouped arrangements must depend upon
the relative shortness of the shafts, and that, when the whole pier is
so lofty that its minor members become mere reeds or rods of stone,
those minor members can no longer be charged with any considerable
weight. And the fact is, that in the most complicated Gothic
arrangements, when the pier is tall and its satellites stand clear of
it, no real work is given them to do, and they might all be removed
without endangering the building. They are merely the _expression_ of a
great consistent system, and are in architecture what is often found in
animal anatomy,--a bone, or process of a bone, useless, under the
ordained circumstances of its life, to the particular animal in which it
is found, and slightly developed, but yet distinctly existent, and
representing, for the sake of absolute consistency, the same bone in its
appointed, and generally useful, place, either in skeletons of all
animals, or in the genus to which the animal itself belongs.

Sec. XXII. Farther: as it is not easy to obtain pieces of stone long
enough for these supplemen