Avery library, as well as the books and photographs
belonging to the Department of Architecture, is accessible every
evening until eleven o'clock, and the Metropolitan Museum is open
twice a week until ten, every facility is afforded for the prosecution
of this work. In order to make the most of these appliances, every
student of the Fourth-year class and all the special students (who are
of similar grade, being received only in advanced standing) prepares
once a month, under the name of Advanced Architectural History, an
original paper. This he illustrates by drawings and reads to the
class. All this affords an almost unexampled opportunity for serious
work.

We exhibit to the students the architecture of the past as a series of
problems just as it appeared to the builders of its own day, and we
hope thus not only to give them a clearer insight into the real spirit
and character of the masterpieces that have come down to us, by
bringing to view the ideas and considerations which really influenced
their designers, but at the same time to exercise our own young men in
the practical application of those same ideas. We hope thus to develop
in them the same good sense and good taste, the same readiness of
invention and happy ingenuity, to which these masterpieces are due.

[Illustration: LXXXIII. Manoir at Archelles, Normandy.]

The exercises themselves may be described as a species of design by
description or by dictation. The attempt is made, by indicating the
conditions under which a given piece of work was executed, to present
to the student the same problem that the workman of old was called
upon to solve. The student can then compare his own solution of it
with the one that has come down to him, thus receiving correction and
guidance in his work from the hand of the master. It is plain that the
special excellencies of the original monument are likely to reveal
themselves with fresh distinctness, and to find special sympathy and
appreciation in the mind of one who has striven, however
unsuccessfully, to solve the same problem.

An example or two taken from widely different fields will suffice to
illustrate this. In studying vaulting, we once got so far as to
understand how oblong vaults were thrown across a nave, while square
vaults covered the aisles. A class of fifteen or twenty students were
then asked to find out how a semi-circular or polygonal apse could be
added to a choir roofed on this system. In the cour