071 Ancient Monuments. 169 



the same time the ears of the bear, animals whose gluttonous 

 propensities perhaps cannot be surpassed, except by those which 

 the ancients have attributed to the monsters before us. 



Their destructive propensity was also announced by the hel- 

 met or buckler, with which they sometimes armed these symbo- 

 lical beings. But, with such an armour, the ancients were 

 never guilty of the folly of combining the feet of the gralla, or 

 of the pahnipedes, birds whose mild and timid manners could 

 not accord with those of the sirens and the harpies. On the 

 contrary, in the different groups meant to represent the fable of 

 Jupiter and Leda, the swan, whose form the Master of thunder 

 had borrowed, invariably presents the beak and the feet of a 

 palmiped. It could not be thus with the Stymphcdides, birds 

 mysterious, but necessarily carnivorous. The statuaries, in con- 

 formity to the ferocity of disposition they ascribed to them, have 

 represented them with a strong and sharp beak, and feet armed 

 with crooked claws. As a consequence of their careful tendency 

 to exact imitation of nature, they have never given them spurs. 

 It is known that this defence is never found on birds with crooked 

 claws, — a fact which the ancients could not certainly have divined 

 by a priori reasoning. 



Struck with the affinities which exist between the organization 

 and the destiny of an animal, the ancients have maintained them 

 even in their most fanciful compositions, but without insisting 

 too much upon them, as they have done respecting the facial 

 angle. They had truly remarked with accuracy, that the hu- 

 man head assumes its highest degree of grandeur and beauty, 

 when the facial angle, in harmony with the other parts, ap- 

 proaches the right angle ; whilst beyond that, it merges into 

 the absurd, losing its imposing presence, in proportion as it is 

 distant from the 90°. 



In applying this rule, and in all its consequences, to the 

 statues which recall the features of the Master of Olympus, or 

 those of Apollo in the beauty of youth, the ancients have not 

 however made it the result of a theory, which perhaps, without 

 the ability of Camper, we shall have yet to conjecture. 



But how is it that the modern statuaries, better acquainted 

 than those of antiquity, with the rules by which the human 

 figure can receive all the beauty of which it is susceptible, are 



