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Goodman (Roving) Rube's father, Truman Rube, is a technical editor by trade and knows something about almost everything. For instance, he would point out to young Goodman the similarities between the tomatoes grown in the family garden, and the deadly nightshade which grew along the road, and explained how for a long time people were afraid to eat tomatoes because they saw what had happened with the deadly nightshade.

So naturally the Rube asked him if he knew what those plants were sprouting out the columns of the Lutheran church he posted a few days ago, and Truman got into how first there were simple uprights and crosspieces called posts and lintels, which got developed into columns and cornices, and then the Romans developed the arch, which is a lot cooler then just having a crosspiece, as you can see from the above.

The Rube himself figured out the evolution of banded columns from this photo: someone realized you could put something extra between the "drum" sections (Fig. 1) like Dagwood would build one of his sandwiches. In Fig. 2, from the Flatiron building, they did that one better by adding bands over the top of the drums.

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