734 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



The Greeks and Romans, whose principles of art the moderns have 

 chiefly imitated, personified certain ideas of their social state, deified 

 and worshiped them. As a general rule, they found in nature the types 

 which they idealized ; in some cases, from ignorance, superstition, or 

 love of the marvelous, they departed from nature, and to that extent, in 

 my judgment, their art was false. Art, as I understand it, should be the 

 interpreter of nature, without too servile an imitation ; art may trans- 

 figure nature, but should never be false to it ; wwnatural and, I may 

 add (as far as knowledge is concerned), supem&iuvnl art 'is tnon- 

 strosity. 



By monstrosity (which is here used in its scientific, not its popular 

 sense) I mean nothing ugly, misshapen, gigantic, or dwarfish, or with 

 any congenital anomalies of conformation, rendering impossible the 

 accomplishment of the ordinary functions of life, but the union of parts 

 incompatible with each other, and impossible when brought to the test 

 of reason and natural laws, however beautiful or suggestive they may 

 be, and however consecrated by unquestioning ages of social, religious, 

 and jBsthetic acceptance. It is true, as Goethe has well said, that " it 

 is in her monstrosities that Nature reveals to us her secrets," which we 

 now know are but the expressions of natural laws ; I hope to show that 

 in the monsters of art she only reveals to us her weakness. 



To illustrate my meaning by a few examples : The ancients, when 

 they represented Saturn as Chronos or Time, the father of the gods, as 

 an old man devouring his children (hours and days and years), armed 

 with a scythe by which he cut down the generations of man, conceived 

 a beautiful, expressive, and natural idea ; but when they put upon him 

 a pair of wings, to indicate the velocity of his flight, he became a mon- 

 ster, for the reason that arms and wings and legs are incompatible, and 

 can not exist in nature, as we know the vertebrate skeleton. Six pairs 

 of limbs are conceivable with the vertebrate skeleton, but wings with- 

 out bones to support or muscles to move them are not 'conceivable. 



Among other winged and impossible monsters created by ancient 

 art, expressing long-cherished ideas, is Cupid or Love — though if 

 would be an anatomical impossibility to move said wings ; he must 

 drop either his arms, with the bow and arrows, or his wings. So Mors 

 or Death, represented by a skeleton, has enormous wings, with not a 

 muscle to move either bone or pinion ; Morpheus the minister of Som- 

 nus or Sleep, Psyche the Soul, and Zephyr the West Wind, have the 

 wings of a butterfly — a mixture of vertebrate and invertebrate charac- 

 ters entirely incompatible. 



The wonderful adaptation of the human skeleton to its uses — the 

 contour of the spine, which renders erect position and biped locomotion 

 possible in him alone of mammals ; the lower limbs for locomotion only ; 

 the upper limbs for prehension, and the service of the senses resident in 

 the head — all these imply a certain bony structure and corresponding 

 muscular developments. If you add another pair of limbs as wings, 



