EVOLUTION OF LITEEATUEE. 25 



timbre of the voice, and the many other modifications of 

 expression. While between the old monotonous dance- 

 chant and a grand opera of our own day, with its endless 

 orchestral complexities and vocal combinations, the con- 

 trast in heterogeneity is so extreme that it seems scarcely 

 credible that the one should have been the ancestor of the 

 other. 



Were they needed, many further illustrations might be 

 cited. Going back to the early time when the deeds of 

 the god-king, chanted and mimetically represented in 

 dances round his altar, were further narrated in picture- 

 writings on the walls of temples and palaces, and so con- 

 stituted a rude literature, we might trace the development 

 of Literature through phases in which, as in the Hebrew 

 Scriptures, it presents in one work theology, cosmogony, 

 history, biography, civil law, ethics, poetry ; through other 

 phases in which, as in the Iliad, the religious, martial, his- 

 torical, the epic, dramatic, and lyric elements are similarly 

 commingled ; down to its present heterogeneous develoj)- 

 ment, in which its divisions and subdivisions are so numer- 

 ous and varied as to defy complete classification. Or we 

 might trace out the evolution of Science ; beginning with 

 the era in which it was not yet differentiated from Art, 

 and was, in union with Art, the handmaid of Religion ; pass- 

 ing through the era in which the sciences were so few and 

 rudimentary, as to be simultaneously cultivated by the same 

 philosophers ; and ending with the era in which the genera 

 and species are so numerous that few can enumerate them, 

 and no one can adequately grasp even one genus. Or we 

 might do the like with Architecture, with the Drama, with 

 Dress. 



But doubtless the reader is already weary of illustra- 

 tions ; and our promise has been amply fulfilled. We 

 believe we have shown beyond question, that that which 

 the German physiologists have found to be the law of 



