[Illustration 37:  THE LAW OF RHYTHMIC DIMINUTION ILLUSTRATED IN THE TAPERING BODY, LIMBS, FINGERS & TOES.]

[Illustration 38]

[Illustration 39]

The body is rich in veiled repetitions, echoes, consonances.  The head and arms are in a sense a refinement upon the trunk and legs, there being a clearly traceable correspondence between their various parts.  The hand is the body in little—­"Your soft hand is a woman of itself"—­the palm, the trunk; the four fingers, the four limbs; and the thumb, the head;-each finger is a little arm, each finger tip a little palm.  The lips are the lids of the mouth, the lids are the lips of the eyes—­and so on.  The law of Rhythmic Diminution is illustrated in the tapering of the entire body and of the limbs, in the graduated sizes and lengths of the palm and the toes, and in the successively decreasing length of the palm and the joints of the fingers, so that in closing the hand the fingers describe natural spirals (Illustrations 37, 38).  Finally, the limbs radiate as it were from the trunk, the fingers from a point in the wrist, the toes from a point in the ankle.  The ribs radiate from the spinal column like the veins of a leaf from its midrib (Illustration 39).

[Illustration 40]

The relation of these laws of beauty to the art of architecture has been shown already.  They are reiterated here only to show that man is indeed the microcosm—­a little world fashioned from the same elements and in accordance with the same Beautiful Necessity as is the greater world in which he dwells.  When he builds a house or temple he builds it not literally in his own image, but according to the laws of his own being, and there are correspondences not altogether fanciful between the animate body of flesh and the inanimate body of stone.  Do we not all of us, consciously or unconsciously, recognize the fact of character and physiognomy in buildings?  Are they not, to our imagination, masculine or feminine, winning or forbidding—­human, in point of fact—­to a greater degree than anything else of man’s creating?  They are this certainly to a true lover and student of architecture.  Seen from a distance the great French cathedrals appear like crouching monsters, half beast, half human:  the two towers stand like a man and a woman, mysterious and gigantic, looking out over city and plain.  The campaniles of Italy rise above the churches and houses like the sentinels of a sleeping camp—­nor is their strangely human aspect wholly imaginary:  these giants of mountain and campagna have eyes and brazen tongues; rising four square, story above story, with a belfry or lookout, like a head, atop, their likeness to a man is not infrequently enhanced by a certain identity of proportion—­of ratio, that is, of height to width:  Giotto’s beautiful tower is an example.  The caryatid is a supporting member in the form of a woman; in the Ionic column we discern her stiffened, like Lot’s wife, into a pillar, with nothing to show her feminine but the spirals of her beautiful hair.  The columns which uphold the pediment of the Parthenon are unmistakably masculine:  the ratio of their breadth to their height is the ratio of the breadth to the height of a man (Illustration 40).