ALB

Air-ve els. In Insects, the atmospheric air Is conveyed through all parts of the body, for the purposes of respiration, chiefly by means of air-ve els, or tracheee. (5ee that word.) AISLE, or ALA (Lat. ala, a wing.) In Architecture, a term used by the English, more especially, to signify the side subdivisions in a church, usually separated from the nave, or centre division, by pillars or columns; but among different nations it bears different significations as applied to architecture. Strabo informs us, that among the Egyptians, the ala? of the temple were the two walls that inclosed the two sides of the pronaos, and which were of the same height as the temple itself. The walls, he observes, from above ground, were a little farther apart than the foundations of the temple, but, as they rose were built with an inclination towards each other. The right understanding, however, of this pa age is attended with difficulty, and seems to have puzzled Pocock no le than ourselves. The Greek alae, called ptera, were the colonnades which surrounded the cell of the temple, the monopteros temple being the only species which had columns without an interior (to them) wall. The peripteral had one tier of columns round the cell, the dipteral two, and the pseudo or false dipteral, which Hermogenes invented, was that in which the ala was single, but occupied the same space on the sides of the cell as the dipteral, though one of the tiers of columns was left out; thus, by metaphor, the columns were called the alse, or wings, of the temple. This term is also applied to the sides of a building which are subordinate to the principal, and central division, and are vulgarly called wings. [s. 40]