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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and against the doctrine of special creations ; for it is not easy to 

 see why a free creating power should impose such limitations 



m itself. So little does Nature vary from the once given type 

 that teratology traces deformities back to it. None of these are 

 real monstrosities ; not even those with only one eye in the middle 

 Of the forehead, in which Herr Exner looked for the original of the 

 Cyclops, while Flaxman erroneously gave Polyphemus three eyes, 

 a third in the forehead, besides the two normal but blind eyes. 

 K.al monsters are those invented in the youth of art by an un- 

 tamed power of portrayal winged forms, originally derived from 

 the East : the bulls of Nimroud, the Harpies, Pegasus, the Sphinx, 

 the griffin ; Artemis, Psyche, the Notos from the Tower of the 

 Winds, the Victory, the angels of the Semitic-Christian cycle. 

 A third pair of extremities (and a fourth appears in Ezekiel) is 

 not only paratypically but mechanically absurd, for the muscles 

 needed to move them are wanting. With happy tact, Schiller 

 has avoided, in the Battle with the Dragon, endowing the mon- 

 ster with the usual wings; and Retsch in his illustrations fur- 

 nished it with a form so possible in comparative anatomy that 

 one might have fancied the plesiosaurus or a zeuglodon had re- 

 turned and become a land-animal. 



To the winged figures may be added, as similar abominations, 

 the Centaurs with two chests and stomachs and double viscera, 

 and Cerberus and the hydra with many heads on many necks, 

 warm-blooded hippocamps and Tritons, whose bodies, without 

 hinder extremities, end in a cold-blooded fish, a conception at the 

 thought of which even Horace was shocked. If they had had at 

 least a horizontal tail-paddle, one might find in them a kind of 

 cetacean. More easily borne are the cloven-footed fauns, horns, 

 pointed ears, and hoofs of which have been inherited by our devil, 

 whose menaces, therefore, in Franz von Kobell's witty apology, 

 Cuvier laughed at as those of a harmless vegetable feeder. The 

 heraldic beasts, like double eagles and unicorns, set up no claims 

 to art, and are protected by historical prescription against the 

 criticism they intrinsically deserve. 



It is a remarkable example of the accommodating disposition 

 of our sense of beauty, that though we are well instructed in the 

 principles of morphology, our eyes are not more offended by some 

 of these false creatures, such as the winged figures of Nike and 

 tin- angels; and it would perhaps be pedantic and idle to forbid 

 artists these time-honored rather symbolical representations, of 

 which the greatest masters of the best periods have only made a 

 v. ry moderate use. But such indulgence has its limits. The 

 giants in our Gigantomachia, whose thighs change at half their 

 length into serpents, and which, instead of two legs, stand on two 

 vertebral columns running out into heads, with separate brains, 



