CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 265 



servation, and though that constellation was of importance to them iu 

 determining the seasons. 1 According to Aratus, who nourished under 

 the successors of Alexander, there are only six Pleiades, and it is a vul- 

 gar error to admit that they were seven, and that one of them was lost. 

 Hipparchus, however, corrected Aratus, and fixed the number of the 

 Pleiades at seven. Nevertheless, Ovid says of the Pleiades : 



" Quae septem dici, sex tamen esse solent ; " 2 



and the poets went on speaking of a lost Pleiad. 8 But nowadays 

 ordinary observers, with good eyesight, can discern fourteen to sixteen 

 stars in this constellation. 



The ancients, then, according to Littrow, described the heavens as 

 imperfectly as though they had been to some extent short-sighted, or 

 as though but this supposition is negatived by other facts the dis- 

 criminating power of the human retina had since become more acute. 

 On the other hand, we cannot sufficiently admire the refinement of 

 their artistic sense in reproducing the forms of the human body. In 

 counting the Pleiades they erred. But the wavy lines of female beauty 

 have never been rendered with greater perfection than by them ; and 

 the Borghese Gladiator gives evidence in every one of his quivering 

 muscles of such close observation as to lead to the supposition that in 

 the ancient art-schools there was an esoteric teaching of anatomy. 4 It 

 is customary to attribute the supreme skill of the ancient sculptors in 

 representing the human body to the advantages they enjoyed, as com- 

 pared with our own artists, who can only study professional models, in 

 frequently viewing the nude in unconstrained action in gymnasia and 

 at the public games. But, with respect to the female figure, the 

 ancient sculptors had no such great advantage over our own, and yet 

 here, too, they have attained unequaled excellence. So, too, our artists 

 have as fair opportunity of studying the breast of a live, nude horse as 

 the ancients had of observing nude athletes ; and yet it was said, during 

 the lifetime of Franz Krtiger, that he was the only artist who knew 

 how to paint a horse's breast. The truth is, that the ancients had a 

 special inclination for this kind of observation, but it lay altogether 

 outside their habits of thought nicely to determine the limits of a phe- 

 nomenon as regards space, time, and weight. Hence, in all that con- 

 cerns artistic forms their eye was very highly developed, but they lacked 

 the training needed for grasping scientific facts. 



They were utter strangers to the art of experimentation, wherein 

 methodical observation under arbitrarily determined conditions com- 

 bines with a fervid inventive imagination and a calm judgment to pro- 



1 Whewell, "History of the Inductive Sciences, vol. i., p. 130, London, 1847. 



2 " Which are said to be seven, though they are but six." Ovid gives two mythologi- 

 cal hypotheses for the disappearance of the seventh Pleiad, "Fasti," lib. iv., v. 170-178. 



3 Cf. Byron's " Beppo," stanza xiv. 



4 Salvage, " Anatomie du Gladiateur combattant applicable aux Beaux-Arts," 1812, 

 p. iv. 



