SCIENCE AND FINE ART. 21 



cessors ; but there can be no better counteractive to this Michael- 

 angelesque mannerism than an earnest study of the real. And a 

 little comparative anatomy protects against such faults as that 

 which overtook a very famous master, who made a joint too many 

 in the hind leg of a horse ; or, as we see on the Fontaine Cuvier 

 near the Jardin des Plantes, to the diversion of the naturalist, a 

 crocodile bending its stiff neck so far back that the snout almost 

 touches the side of the animal. 



We are, however, the less astonished at Mr. Ruskin's judgment 

 when we learn that he also lays the same ban upon the study of 

 the nude as upon that of anatomy. It should extend, he says, no 

 further than health, custom, and propriety permit the exposure of 

 the body, for which the use of anatomy would certainly be limited. 

 It is well that propriety, custom, and health permitted more free- 

 dom on this point among the Hellenes than exists in England. 

 Fortunately, the English department of the Jubilee Exhibition 

 four years ago gave us opportunity to satisfy ourselves that Mr. 

 Ruskin's dangerous paradoxes had not been carried out, and 

 allowed us to forget them in the sight of Mr. Alma Tadema's and 

 Mr. Herkomer's magnificent contributions. Mr. Walter Crane's 

 charming series of pictures, which adorn our book tables, have 

 also risen up against Mr. Ruskin's absurd doctrine. 



In the same lectures Mr. Ruskin assailed the theory of selec- 

 tion and descent with great vigor, and attacked the censure, based 

 upon it, of artists' pictures representing vertebrates with more 

 than four extremities. He said : " Can any law be conceived 

 more arbitrary or more apparently causeless ? What strongly 

 planted three-legged animals there might have been ! What 

 systematically radiant five-legged ones ! What volatile six- 

 winged ones ! What circumspect seven-headed ones ! Had Dar- 

 winism been true, we should long ago have split our heads in two 

 with foolish thinking, or thrust out, from above our covetous 

 hearts, a hundred desirous arms and clutching hands, and changed 

 ourselves into Briarean cephalopods." * 



It is clear from these words that this false prophet had no 

 notion of what we in morphology call a type. Can it be necessary 

 to tell Sir Richard Owen's and Prof. Huxley's countryman that 

 every vertebrate has as the foundation of its body a vertebral 

 column, expanding in front into the skull, and contracting behind 

 into the tail ; encircled in front and behind by two bone girdles, 

 the pectoral and the pelvic arches, from which depend the fore 

 and the hinder extremities, regularly jointed ? That paleontology 

 has never discovered a vertebrate form divergent from this type 

 is certainly a striking argument in favor of the theory of descent 



* The Eagle's Nest, p. 204. 



