"For noble Britons sprang from Trojans bold And Troy-Novant was built of old Troyes ashes cold."
If any reliance could be placed on this old story the Corporation of London might do well to embody the Labyrinth, or Troy-town, in their armorial bearings, for what symbol could better typify the complexities of our metropolis?
There is no limit to the number of patterns which, without any metaphorical extension of terms, we may legitimately describe as coming within the scope of the words "maze" and "labyrinth." In common speech we use either word to describe any artificial design or natural pattern presenting a convoluted appearance, or any path or channel of an intricate nature, but when we come to consider the matter more carefully we feel the need for some definition. As we have seen, the dictionaries do not help us much in this respect. Let us, therefore, decide what limitations we feel compelled to observe in our use of the terms from the point of view of designers or unravellers of mazes and labyrinths.
In the first place we must limit ourselves to works of artifice, _i.e._, we must exclude the "labyrinths" of nature, such as forests, caverns, and so forth, and agree that any application of our terms to such objects is to be regarded as strictly metaphorical.
Secondly, we must require, as a practical corollary to our first condition, that there shall be an element of purposefulness in the design. The purpose may be the portrayal of the imagined course of the sun through the heavens, the symbolisation of the folds of sin or of the Christian's toilsome journey through life, the construction of a puzzle, or the mere pleasure to be derived from packing the maximum of path into the minimum of space, but there must be an object of some sort. The aimless scribblings of an infant, like the trail of an ink-dipped fly, may in this connection be considered as the fortuitous meanderings of nature rather than the conscious design of man. By imposing this condition we exclude the Indian pictograph shown in Fig. 132, which, in the absence of any indication as to its significance, can only by a loose extension of the term be called a labyrinth.
(Our use of the words "aim," "design," and "purpose" will be quite clear to everybody but the sciolist dabbling in metaphysics.)