January 7, 1892] 



NATURE 



227 



made to the decoration of our homes, and the ornaments 

 of female dress. 



In one direction, however, it will be observed that men 

 of science readily dispense with a strict observation of 

 the laws of nature in art, at the risk of being charged 

 with inconsistency. In works of art, both ancient and 

 modern, flying and soaring figures occur in thousands. 

 These, no doubt, sin against the omnipotent and deeply 

 felt laws of gravity quite as much as the most loathsome 

 creations of a depraved imagination against the principles 

 of comparative anatomy, familiar only to a few adepts. 

 Nevertheless they do not displease us. We prefer them 

 without wings, because wings are contrary to the type, 

 and could be of no use to them without an enormous 

 bulk of muscle. But we do not mind the Madonna 

 Sistina standing on clouds, and the subordinate figures 

 kneeling on the same impossible ground. " Ezekiel's 

 Vision" in the Palazzo Pitti is certainly less acceptable. 

 But to quote modern examples, Flaxman's " Gods flying to 

 the aid of the Trojans," or Cornelius's Apocalyptical riders, 

 and Ary Scheffer's divine Francesca di Rimini, with 

 which Dorc had to enter into hopeless competition, are 

 not the less enjoyable because they are physically im- 

 possible. We do not even 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 endeavours 

 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 

 practised 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. It is, that 

 under especially favourable bodily conditions we experi- 

 ence 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 head<, lost in the vaulted azure, 

 The lark sends down his flickering lay, 

 Wden over crags and piny highlands 

 The poising eagle slowly soars, 

 And over plains and lakes and islands 

 The crane sails by to other shores." 1 



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 



* Translation of Goethe's " Faust," by Bayard Taylor. 



NO. 1 158, VOL. 45] 



ask : What have sculpture and painting been able to do 

 for science in return for its various services ? With the 

 exception of external work, such as the representing of 

 natural objects, not much else than the results obtained 

 by painters as to the composition and combination of 

 colours, which, however, have not exercised as strong 

 an influence on chromatics as music on acoustics. It is 

 known that the Greeks possessed a canon of the propor- 

 tions of the human body, attributed to Polycletes, which, 

 as Prof. Merkel recently objected, unluckily only applied 

 to the full-grown frame, to the detriment of many ancient 

 works of art. The blank was not systematically filled up 

 till the time of Gottfried Schadow. This canon has 

 since become the basis of a most promising branch of 

 anthropology — anthropometry in its application to the 

 human races. 



If the definition of art were stretched so far as to in- 

 clude the power of thinking and conceiving artistically, 

 then indeed it would be easy enough to find relations 

 and transitions between artists and philosophers, though, 

 as we remarked at the beginning, their paths diverge 

 so completely. But it is not so certain that natural 

 science would necessarily be benefited by an artistic con- 

 ception of its problems. The aberration of science at the 

 beginning of this century known as German physio- 

 philosophy owed its origin quite as much to aesthetics as 

 to metaphysics, and the same erroneous principles guided 

 Goethe in his scientific researches. The artistic concep- 

 tion of natural problems is in so far defective, as it con- 

 tents itself with well-rounded theoretical abstractions, 

 instead of penetrating to the causal connection of events, 

 to the limits of our understanding. It may suffice in 

 cases where analogies are to be recognized by a plastic 

 imagination between certain organic forms, such as the 

 structure of plants or vertebrate animals ; but it fails 

 altogether in subjects such as the theory of colours, 

 because it stops short at the study of what are supposed 

 to be primordial phenomena, instead of analyzing them 

 mathematically and physically. Prof, von Briicke subse- 

 quently, by the aid of the undulatory theory, traced to 

 their physical causes the colours of opaques on which 

 Goethe founded his theory of colours, and which to this 

 day have tended rather to darken than to enlighten 

 certain German intellects. The difference between artistic 

 and scientific treatment becomes very evident in this 

 example. 



Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that artistic feeling 

 may be useful to scientific men. There is an sesthetic 

 aspect of experiment which strives to impart to it what 

 we have termed mechanical beauty ; and no experimenter 

 will regret having responded to its demands as far as was 

 in his power. Moreover, the transition from a literary to a 

 scientific epoch in the intellectual development of nations 

 is accompanied by a tendency to brilliant delineation of 

 natural phenomena, arising from the double influence of 

 the setting and the dawning genius. Instances thereof 

 are Buffon and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in France, and 

 Alexander von Humboldt in Germany, who, to his ex- 

 treme old age, remained faithful to this tendency. In 

 the course of time, this somewhat incongruous mixture of 

 styles splits into two different manners. Popular teach- 

 ing preserves its ornamental character, while the results 

 of scientific research only claim that kind of beauty which 

 in literature corresponds to mechanical beauty. In this 

 sense, as I long ago ventured to indicate hereon a similar 

 occasion, a strictly scientific paper may, in tasteful hands, 

 be made as finished a piece of writing as a work of 

 fiction. To strive after such perfection will always repay 

 the trouble to men of science ; for it is the best means of 

 testing whether a chain of reasoning, embracing a series 

 of observations and conclusions, is faultlessly complete. 



And this kind of beauty, which often graces, uncon- 

 sciously and unsought for, the utterances of genius, will 

 no doubt be also found to adorn Leibnitz's writings. 



