ction is not yet clear, and it is met by uncertain application of
mass or strength in the buttress, sometimes by mere thickening of the
wall into square piers, which are partly piers, partly buttresses, as in
Norman keeps and towers. But as science advances, the weight to be borne
is designedly and decisively thrown upon certain points; the direction
and degree of the forces which are then received are exactly calculated,
and met by conducting buttresses of the smallest possible dimensions;
themselves, in their turn, supported by vertical buttresses acting by
weight, and these perhaps, in their turn, by another set of conducting
buttresses: so that, in the best examples of such arrangements, the
weight to be borne may be considered as the shock of an electric fluid,
which, by a hundred different rods and channels, is divided and carried
away into the ground.

Sec. VII. In order to give greater weight to the vertical buttress piers
which sustain the conducting buttresses, they are loaded with pinnacles,
which, however, are, I believe, in all the buildings in which they
become very prominent, merely decorative: they are of some use, indeed,
by their weight; but if this were all for which they were put there, a
few cubic feet of lead would much more securely answer the purpose,
without any danger from exposure to wind. If the reader likes to ask any
Gothic architect with whom he may happen to be acquainted, to
substitute a lump of lead for his pinnacles, he will see by the
expression of his face how far he considers the pinnacles decorative
members. In the work which seems to me the great type of simple and
masculine buttress structure, the apse of Beauvais, the pinnacles are
altogether insignificant, and are evidently added just as exclusively to
entertain the eye and lighten the aspect of the buttress, as the slight
shafts which are set on its angles; while in other very noble Gothic
buildings the pinnacles are introduced as niches for statues, without
any reference to construction at all: and sometimes even, as in the tomb
of Can Signoria at Verona, on small piers detached from the main
building.

Sec. VIII. I believe, therefore, that the development of the pinnacle is
merely a part of the general erectness and picturesqueness of northern
work above alluded to: and that, if there had been no other place for
the pinnacles, the Gothic builders would have put them on the tops of
their arches (they often _did_ on the tops