680 ON THE RELATION OF NATURAL SCIENCE TO ART. 
di Rimini, with which Doré had to enter into hopeless competition, are 
not the less enjoyable because they are physically impossible. We do 
noteven object to Luini’s representing the corpse of St. Catharine 
carried through the air by angels, or to that of Sarpedon, in Flaxman’s 
drawing, by Sleep and Death. 
In an interesting lecture on the “ Physiology of Flying and Soaring 
in the Fine Arts,” Prof. Exner endeavors to explain why illustrations 
of men and animals in this condition, though impossible and never 
visible in real life, strike us as familiar and natural. I do not profess 
to agree entirely with the solution which he appears to prefer. His 
idea is that our sensations in swimming, and the position in which we 
see persons above us in the water when diving, are similar to what we 
would experience in flying. Considering what a short time the art of 
swimming has been generally practiced by modern society, especially 
by ladies, who nevertheless appreciate flying figures just the same, 
doubts arise as to the correctness of Prof. Exner’s explanation. To 
attribute the feeling to atavism in a Darwinian sense, dating from a 
fish period in the development of man, seems rather far-fetched. And 
do not the sensations and aspect of a skater come much nearer to flying 
or soaring than those of a swimmer? 
Another remark of Prof. Exner, which had also occurred to me, 
appears more acceptable. Itis, that under especially favorable bodily 
conditions we experience in our dreams the delicious illusion of flying. 
For 
“in each soul is born the pleasure 
Of yearning onward, upward, and away, 
When o’er our heads, lost in the vaulted azure, 
The lark sends down his flickering lay, 
When over crags and piny highlands 
The poising eagle slowly soars, 
And over plains and lakes and islands 
The crane sails by to other shores.”’* 
Who would not long, like Faust, to soar out and away towards the 
setting sun, and to see the silent world bathed in the evening rays of 
eternal light far beneath his feet? And when we long for anything, 
we love to hear of it, and to see it brought before us in image, Our 
desire to rise into the «ether, and our pleasure in ‘ Ascensions” and 
similar representations, are further enhanced by the ancient belief of 
mankind in the existence of celestial habitations for the blessed beyond 
the starry vault; a belief which Giordano Bruno put an end to, though 
not so thoroughly but that we are constantly forgetting how badly we 
should fare, were we actually to ascend into those vast, airless, icy 
regions, Which even the swiftest eagle would take years to traverse 
before alighting on some probably uninhabitable sphere. 
We are now inclined to reverse the question, and to ask: What have 
sculpture and painting been able to do for science in return for its vari- 
“Translation of Goethe’s “ Faust,” by Bayard Taylor. 
