ON THE RELATION OF NATURAL SCIENCE TO ART. 677 
ing illustrations, the delight of our nurseries, have been produced with- 
out disregard of Mr. Ruskin’s preposterous doctrine. 
In the same lecture Mr. Ruskin opposes with the utmost vehemence 
the theory of evolution and natural selection, and the esthetic rule 
founded on it, according to which vertebrate animals should not be 
represented with more than four legs. ‘Can any law be conceived,” 
he says, ‘‘more arbitrary, or more apparently causeless? What 
strongly planted three-legged animals there might have been! what 
systematically radiant five-legged ones! what volatile six-winged ones! 
what circumspect seven-headed ones! Had Darwinism been true, we 
should long ago have split our heads in two with foolish thinking, or 
thrust out, from above our covetous hearts, a hundred desirous arms 
and clutching hands, and changed ourselves into Briarean Cephalo- 
poda.” 
Obviously, this false prophet has no notion of what in morphology is 
called a type. Can it be necessary to remind a countryman of Sir 
Richard Owen and Prof. Huxley that the body of every vertebrate ani- 
mal is based on a vertebral column, from which it derives its name, 
expanding at one end into a skull, reduced to a tail at the other, and 
surrounded before and behind by two bony girdles, the pectoral and 
the pelvic arches, from which depend the fore and hind limbs, with 
their typical joints? The very fact that paleontology has never known 
any form of vertebrate animal to depart from this type is in itself a 
striking argument in favor of the doctrine of evolution and against 
the assumption of separate acts of creation, there being no reason 
why a free creative power should have thus restricted itself. So little 
will nature deviate from the type once given that even deformities are 
traced back to it by teratology. They are not really monstrosities; 
not even those with a single eye in the middle of the forehead, which 
Prof. Exner takes to be prototypes of the Cyclops, Flaxman being cer- 
tainly mistaken in representing Polyphemus with three eyes—two nor- 
mal ones which are blind, and a third in the forehead. Real monstros- 
ities are those winged shapes of Eastern origin, invented by a riotous 
faney while art was in its childhood; the bulls of Nimrid, the Harpies, 
Pegasus, the Sphinx, the griffin, Artemis, Psyche, Notos of the Tower 
of Winds, the goddesses of Victory, and the angels of Semitic-Chris- 
tian origin. <A third pair of extremities (Ezekiel even admits a fourth), 
is not only contrary to the type, but also irrational in a mechanical 
sense, there being no muscles to govern them. In the “ Fight with the 
Dragon” Schiller has happily avoided giving his monster the usual 
pair of wings; and in Retzsch’s illustrations its shape agrees so far with 
comparative anatomy as to recall a Plesiosaurus or Zeuglodon returned 
to life and changed into a land animal; indeed, the resemblance be- 
tween those animals and the mythical dragon has led to the question 
whether the first human being might not have actually gazed upon the 
last specimens of those extinct animal races. 
