KTTY. WILUAM. 



EUCLID OF ALEXANDRIA. 



geotlamen wished him to discontinue bit attendance, u they deemed 

 his taking hit plica among tha students inoompntibla with the dignity 

 of an academician, he replied that be would rather forego that honour, 

 though the chief object of hu ambition, than five up the Life 

 Academy. Though always in love, Btty never married. A niece 

 kpt hi< house, and bii quiet and blameless life passed on without 

 adventure, in the steady practice of hit calling, till 1848, when 

 failing health and powers induced him to return to bis native city ; 

 where in a pleasant little house his remaining day*, with the exception 

 of his visits to London, passed in almost unbroken tranquillity, llu 

 died there on the 13th of November 1849, and wai buried in the 

 churchyard of St. Glare Msrygate : his funeral being attended by a 

 large number of the citizens, beaded by the mayor and other muni- 

 cipal authorities, with the Council of the Yorkshire Philotophical 

 Society, the pupils of York School of Design (in tha establishment of 

 which he took an active part), Ac. 



We have not attempted to record the appearance of more than a 

 few of Etty's earlier pictures. To have mentioned in succession even 

 the more attractive of the works of so prolific a painter during his 

 career of nearly forty yean would have been manifestly impossible 

 hare. The great event of his life was the collection of as many of his 

 works as could be obtained, and their exhibition in 1848, in the rooms 

 of th Society of ArU, and on that occasion were exhibited about 

 130 paintings, many of them of very large size. Few who saw that 

 remarkable gathering will be likely to forget it, and the painter may 

 well have felt proud as ha gazed on so splendid a spectacle and all 

 the work of hii own right hand. 



Etty has himself, in the ' Autobiography ' so often quoted, given a 

 lilt of bis principal paintings. And first he places of course his great 

 historical pictures, his account of which will serve in some measure 

 to illustrate the peculiar character of the man : " My aim in all my 

 great pictures has b<-en to paint some great moral on the heart": 



The Combat,' the Beauty of Mer,-y ; the three ' Judith ' pictures 

 PatnotMM, and self-devotion to her country, her people, and her 

 God ; ' Benaiah, David's chief Captain,' Valour ; ' Ulysses and thu 

 Syrens,' the importance of resisting &nua{ licliyhtt, or an Homeric 

 paraphrase ou the ' Wages of Sin is Death ; ' the three pictures of 

 'Joan of Arc.' Rdigion, Fa/our, Loyalty and fat rial inn, like tha 

 modern Judith ; these in all midce nine colossal pictures, as it was 

 my desire to paint three times three." Of his other principal works 

 the following may be mentioned as characteristic examples : ' The 

 Judgment of Pari ; ' ' Venus attired by the Graces; ' ' Hylas and the 

 Nymph ; ' The Bevy of Fair Women j ' The Rape of Proserpine ; ' 

 ' La Kleur-de-Lis ; ' ' The Parting of Hero and Leander ; ' ' Diana and 

 Eudyuiion ; ' 'The Death of Hero and Leauder; ' 'The Graces;' 'A 

 Bivouac of Cupid and his Company;' and numberless Cupids and 

 Psyches, Veouses, Ledas, or as he more prudishly terms them ' Ny m phs 

 with Swans,' Ac. ; besides his ' Samson and Delilah ; ' ' Magdalen ; ' 



Captives by the Waters of Babylon ; ' Parable of the Ten Virgins ; ' 

 and other scriptural subjects treated in a very unpuritanic style. 

 The ' Judith ' series, the ' Combat,' and 'Benaiah,' five colossal pictures 

 magnificent in colour and execution, and in many respects admirable 

 in conception and composition even if they are not fairly to be 

 classed in the highest style of historic art, were purchased in a fine 

 spirit by the Koyl Scottish Academy ; ' Ulysses and the Syrens' in 

 the property of the Royal Manchester Institution. Tha only picture 

 possessed by tha nation of Etty's painting is that of ' Youth at the 

 Prow and Pleasure at the Helm,' in the Vernon Gall-Ty. 



Etty is undoubtedly one of the greatest names in English art 1 to 

 chose for himself a somewhat remarkable path, and in it he walked 

 without a rival. His want of classical knowledge his learning being 

 pretty nearly confined to Lempriore's Dictionary together with his 

 deficiency in every kind of intellectual culture, except in the technics 

 of painting, of course militated against his taking a first rank as a 

 painter of classic themes. All his works evidence his want of acquaint- 

 ance with the history, the archasology, and even with the poetry of 

 Greece and Horn*. But, allowance being made for these deficiencies, 

 or rather regarding his pictures as the mere vehicles for the exhibition 

 of the undraped human form, his paintings must be allowed a very 

 biijli place in comparison with those of any other modern painter. 

 To tha highest order of female beauty either in face or form he never 



rttainad harlly pretended ; yet there is evidenced in all his female 

 figure* such a thorough sense of enjoyment, so much life and hearti- 

 ness, and, looking at them as pictures, there is shown so remarkable a 

 knowledge of the female form, and such facility in rendering it in free 

 spontaneous action, as few if any modern artists of any country have 

 quailed, and none even in nlden times surpassed. 



Kttr towards the close of his life seems to have become especially 

 urb-d by the strong remarks occasionally made on his choice of 



rabjecta, and still more on his mode of treatment. Ho seems to have 

 thought (and his admirer* have spoken as though they thought so 

 too), that the objections raised to so free a display of the female form 

 rs of morality, was in fact an implication that the painter 

 was immoral. Bat no such charge could have been intended by any 

 one who knew anything of the painter. Few men in private life have 

 givan leu occasion to the breath of scandal He was scrupulou.ly 

 upright, aober. and pure. An enthusiast in his art bo wa one of the 

 moat single- m. n<1 <d of men ; but it was not to be wondered at that the 



painter of works so opposed to the current notions of propriety should 

 have had to bear with some bard judgments on the tendency of his 

 works. He sought to vindicate himself and his intentions with his pen 

 a well as his tongue, but while personally ha needed no vindication, 

 the only vindication his pencil can receive must be that which the 

 works themselves furnish. 



(Autviioffraphy in Art-Journal, 1819; Qilohrist, Life of WiUiam 

 Etty, R.A.. 2 vols. 8vo, 1855.) 



EUCLID OF ALEXAN'URIA. A writer who has given his own 

 name to a science cannot be fairly treated of in any other place than 

 its history. We shall therefore devote the present article to such an 

 imperfect sketch of the early progress of the science of geometry as 

 its meagre history, combined with the narrowness of our limits, will 

 allow. 



There is a ttock hiitory of the rise of geometry, supported by the 

 names of Strabo, Diodorus, and Proclus, namely, that the Egyptians, 

 having their landmarks y. arly destroyed by the rise of the Nila, wore 

 obliged to invent an art of land-surveying in order to preserve the 

 memory of the bounds of property out of which art geometry arose. 

 This story, combined with another attributing the science directly to 

 the gods, forms the first light which we have on the subject, and both 

 in one are worthily sung by the poet who figures at tUe head of an 

 obsolete English course of mathematics : 



" To teach wesk mortals property to Kan, 

 Down came Geometry and form'd a phm.' 1 



There ia no proof whatever that the Egyptians wero more of 

 geometers than of astronomers, and the supposition that the rise of 

 the Nile obliged the builders of the Pyramids to make new landmarks 

 once a year, requires at least contemporary evidence to make it I.. 

 At the same time, the question of the actual origin of geometry is a 

 very difficult one, and auy conclusion can only bo of very modcr.it'- 

 probability. 



Among the Chinese the Jesuit missionaries found very little know- 

 ledge of the properties of space : a few rules for mensuration, and the 

 famous property of the right-angled triangle, being all that they could 

 ascertain. Of all the books which Gaubil could find professing to be 

 written before B.C. 206, there is only one which contains anything 

 immediately connected with geometry. From this writing (call.d 

 ' Tcheou-pcy ') it is not very certain whether the Chinese posse -sod 

 the property of the right-angled triangle generally, or only one parti- 

 cular ca.se, namely, when the sides ar,t S, 4, and 5 ; and nothing appears 

 which directly or indirectly resembles demonstration. Tue Hindoos 

 produce a much larger bo.ly of knowledge, but of uncertain daw. The 

 works of Brahmegupta and Bhascara, of the 7th and 12th centuries of 

 the Christian era (according to Colebrooke), contain a system of 

 arithmetical mensuration which is certainly older than the compilers 

 mentioned, and in which the property of the right-angled triangle is 

 made to produce a considerable number of results ; for instance, tha 

 method of finding the area of a triangle of which the three sides are 

 given. By a figure drawn on the m.irgiu of some manuscripts, it 

 appears that a demonstration of the property in question ha<l 

 obtained. The circumference of the circle is given as bearing to the 

 diameter the proportion of 3927 to 1250 by tho later writer, being 

 exactly that of 3-1410 to 1. Brahmegupta takes the proportion of 

 the square root of 10 to 1, or 3'1G to 1. The superior correctness of 

 the later writer could not have arisen from any intermediate commu- 

 nication with Europe, since the true ratio was not known so near as 

 .J'llli; till after the 12th century; and tha Persians (as appears by 

 the work of Mohammed-beu-Mu*a) had adopted this ratio from thj 

 Hindoos, before the discovery of an equally exact ratio in Europe. 

 We shall enter into more details on this subject in the article Vx. v 

 GANITA, merely observing that though no date cau be fixed to the 

 commencement of geometry in India, yet the certainty which we now 

 have that algebra and the decimal arithmetic have come from that 

 quarter, the recorded visits of the earlier Greek philosopher* to Hin- 

 dustan (though we allow weight rather to the tendency to suppose that 

 philosophers visited India, than to the strength of thu evidence that 

 they actually did so), together with the very striking proofs of 

 originality which abound in the writings of that country, make h 

 essential to consider the claim of the Hindoos, or of their predecessors, 

 to the invention of geometry. That is, waiving the question whether 

 they were Hindoos who invented decimal arithmetic and algebra, \\<- 

 advance that the people which first taught those branches of science 

 ia vn-y likely to have bean the first which taught geometry ; and again, 

 eeiug that we certainly obtained the former two either from or at 

 least through India, we think it highly probable that the earliest 

 European geometry came either from or through the same country. 



Of tha Babylonian and of the Egyptian geometry we hive no 

 remains whatever, though each natiou has been ofteu nai<l to 

 invented the acieuc -. In reference to the authorities mentioned above 

 in favour of the Egyptians, to whom we may add Diogenei Laci tin-, 

 4o,, we may say that no one of the writers who tells the ktory in 

 question is known as a geometer except Proclus, the latest of them 

 all ; and ns if to give tha assertion tho character of an hypothesis, this 

 last writer al<o odds that the Phoenicians, on account of the want* 

 nf their commerce, became the inventors of arithmetic. In the Jewi-h 

 writings there is DO trace of any knowledge of geometry. So that, 



