678 ON THE RELATION OF NATURAL SCIENCE TO ART. 
An abomination closely related to the winged beasts are the Cen- 
taurs, with two thoracic and abdominal cavities and a double set of 
viscera; the Cerberus and Hydra, with several heads on as many 
necks; and the warm-blooded Hippocamps and Tritons, whose bodies, 
destitute of hind limbs, end in cold-blooded fish—an anomaly which 
already shocked Horace. If they had at least a horizontal tail fin they 
might pass fora kind of whale. The cloven-footed faun is less intolerable ; 
from him our Satan inherited his horns, pointed ears, and hoofs, on ac- 
count of which Cuvier, in Franz von Kobell’s witty apologue, ridicules 
him as an inoffensive vegetable feeder. The heraldic animals, such as 
the double eagle and the unicorn, have no artistic pretensions, and 
their historical origin entitles them to an indulgence they would other- 
wise not deserve. 
It is a remarkable instance of the flexibility of our sense of beauty 
that, though saturated with morphological principles, our eye is no 
longer offended by some of these monstrosities, such as the winged 
Nike and the angels; and it would perhaps be pedantic, certainly in- 
effectual, to entirely condemn these traditional and more or less sym- 
bolical figures, though in fact the greatest masters of the best epochs 
have made very slight use of them. There are however limits to our 
toleration. Giants, as they occur in our Gigantomachia, with thighs 
turning half way down into serpents, which consequently rest, not upon 
two legs, but upon two vertebral columns ending in heads and endowed 
with special brains, spinal cords, hearts, and intestinal canals, special 
lings, kidneys, and sense organs—these are, and always will be, the 
abhorrence of every morphologically trained eye. ‘They prove that, if 
the sculptors of Pergamon surpassed their predecessors of the Periclean 
era in technical skill, they were certainly second to them in artistic re- 
finement. Perhaps they should be excused on the plea that tradition 
bound them to represent the giants with serpent legs. The Hippo- 
camps and Tritons, with horses’ legs and fish tails, which disfigure our 
Schlossbriicke, date from a period in which classical taste still reigned 
supreme, and morphological views were still less widely diffused than 
at present. Let us therefore pardon Schinkel for designing or at least 
sanctioning them, as well as the winged horse and griffin on the roof 
of the Schauspielhaus, for which he must also be held responsible. But 
our indignation is justly aroused when a celebrated modern painter de- 
picts with crude realism such misshapen male and female monsters 
wallowing on rocks, or splashing about in the sea, their bodies ending 
in fat shiny salmon, with the seam between the human skin and the 
scaly cover scantily disguised. Such ultramarine marvels are wor- 
shipped by the crowd as the creations of genius; then what a genius 
Ho6llen-Breughel must have been! 
Curiously enough, the inhabitants of the caves of Périgord, the con- 
temporaries of the mammoth and musk ox in France, and the bushmen 
whose paintings were discovered by Prof. Fritsch, only represented as 
