SCIENCE AND FINE ART. 23 



spinal marrows, hearts, intestinal canals, lungs, kidneys, and 

 sense-organs, are and remain an intolerable sight to the mor- 

 phologically cultivated eye, and prove that, although the sculp- 

 tors of Pergamon were superior in technical ability to their pre- 

 decessors of the age of Pericles, they were inferior to them in re- 

 finement of artistic feeling. They were perhaps pardonable, so 

 far as tradition bound them, for making giants with snakes' legs. 

 The hippocamps and the Tritons with horses' legs and double 

 fish-tails which disfigure the railings of our Schlossbrucke, come 

 from another time, when the antique still ruled unrestrained and 

 morphological standards were less common property than they 

 are now. But it is a matter of deep moment to us, if a famous 

 painter of the present suffers such monstrosities, issuing from 

 the trunk, as sleek, sheeny salmon hardly concealing the line 

 between the human skin and the scales, to dance realistically 

 on the cliffs or splash around in the sea. The multitude ad- 

 mires such blue sea-marvels as works of genius ; what a genius, 

 then, must Hollen-Breughel have been ! 



Singularly enough, the primitive men in the caves of Pe'ri- 

 gord, contemporaries of the mammoth and the musk ox in 

 France, and the Bushmen, whose paintings Herr Fritsch discov- 

 ered,* only painted the animals known to them as truly as they 

 could, while the comparatively highly civilized Aztecs outran all 

 that is Oriental in abominable inventions. It almost seems as if 

 bad taste belonged to a certain middle stage of culture. It fol- 

 lows from what we have said that anatomical instruction in art 

 schools should not be confined to osteology, myology, and the 

 theory of human motion, but should take pains to inculcate in 

 the pupils not a very hard thing the fundamental principles of 

 vertebrate morphology. 



It should be the task of botanists to expose the breaches of 

 the laws of the metamorphoses of plants which meet them so 

 frequently in the acanthus arabesques, palmettos, rosettes, and 

 scroll ornaments that are borrowed from the antique. But for 

 obvious reasons these offenses do not afflict the student of plants 

 so painfully as malformations of men and animals, repulsive to a 

 sound taste, affect the comparative anatomist. Moreover, a more 

 wholesome turn has lately come over floral ornament. When in 

 the Renaissance the Gothic was displaced by the antique, art was 

 impoverished of ornamental motives. The richness of invention, 

 the naive observation of Nature, of which the rows of capitals 

 in many cloisters bear witness, yielded gradually to a conventional 

 schematism at the base of which was nothing real. But as Rauch 

 at Carrara, instead of the eagle of a statue of Jupiter, made 



* Drei Jahre in Siidafrica. Reiseskitzzen, etc. Breslau, 1868, pp. 99, 100. 



