226 



NATURE 



[January 7, 1892 



delight of our nurseries, have been produced without dis- 

 regard 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 aesthetic 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 Cephalopoda." 



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 animal 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 palaeontology has never known any form 

 of vertebrate animal to depart from this type is in itself 

 a striking argument in favour 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 monstrosi- 

 ties ; 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 certainly mistaken in repre- 

 senting Polyphemus with three eyes — two normal ones 

 which are blind, and a third in the forehead. Real mon- 

 strosities are those winged shapes of Eastern origin, 

 invented by a riotous fancy while art was in its child- 

 hood : the bulls of Nimrud, the Harpies, Pegasus, the 

 Sphinx, the griffin, Artemis, Psyche, Notos of the Tower 

 of Winds, the goddesses of Victory, and the angels of 

 Semitic-Christian 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 

 Diagon," 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 orZeuglodon returned to life and changed 

 into a land animal ; indeed, the resemblance between those 

 animals and the mythical dragon has led to the question 

 whether the first human beings might not have actually 

 gazed upon the last specimens of those extinct animal races. 

 An abomination closely related to the winged beasts are 

 the Centaurs, 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 for a kind of whale. The cloven-footed 

 Faun is less intolerable ; from him our Satan inherited his 

 horns, pointed ears, and hoofs, on account 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 pre- 

 tensions, and their historical origin entitles them to an 

 indulgence they would otherwise 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 



NO. 1 158, VOL. 45] 



it would perhaps be pedantic, certainly ineffectual, 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 in- 

 testinal canals, special lungs, 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 refinement. 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 depicts 

 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 

 worshipped by the crowd as the creations of genius ; 

 then what a genius Hollen-Breughel must have been ! 



Curiously enough, the inhabitants of the caves of 

 Pdrigord, the contemporaries of the mammoth and 

 musk-ox in France, and the bushmen whose paintings 

 were discovered by Prof. Fritsch, only represented as 

 faithfully as possible such animals with which they were 

 familiar ; whereas the Aztecs, a people of comparatively 

 high civilization, indulged in fancies of more than 

 Eastern hideousness. It would almost appear as if bad 

 taste were associated with a middle stage of culture. 



With regard to the teaching of anatomy in schools of 

 art, the above proves that it should not be confined to 

 human osteology, myology, and the doctrine of locomotion 

 alone, but that it should also endeavour— and the task 

 is not difficult — to familiarize the student with the 

 fundamental principles of vertebral morphology. 



Botanists should in their turn point out such violations 

 of the laws of the metamorphosis of plants as must, no 

 doubt, frequently strike them in the acanthus arabesques, 

 palmettos, rosettes, and scrolls, handed down to us from 

 the ancients. From obvious reasons, however, these 

 cannot affect them as painfully as malformations of men 

 and animals, being in themselves repulsive to natural 

 feelings, would the comparative anatomist. Moreover, a 

 beneficial revolution has recently taken place in floral 

 ornament. The displacement of Gothic art by the 

 antique during the Renaissance had led to a dearth of 

 ideas in decorative art. The rich fancy and naive 

 observation of nature, displayed upon the capitals of 

 many a cloister, had gradually given way to a fixed con- 

 ventionalism, no longer founded on reahty. Rauch, at 

 Carrara, in search of a model for the eagles on his 

 monuments, was the first to turn to a golden eagle, 

 accidentally captured on the spot, instead of to one of 

 the statues of Jupiter. It was then that, towards the 

 middle of the century, decorative art began to shake 

 off its fetters, and, combining truthfulness with beauty, 

 returned to the study and artistic reproduction of the 

 living plants with which we are surrounded. In this 

 respect the Japanese had long ago adopted a better 

 course, and to them we have since become indebted for 

 many suggestions. Thus highly welcome additions were 



