DIFFICULTIES OF DRAWING. 349 



could one expect under such conditions ? Of course, the 

 artist was not a zoologist, or we should have had a 

 zoologist's report. Would the drawing so produced be of 

 any value ? Surely yes; of great value. It would doubt- 

 less be a tolerably faithful representation of the general 

 appearance of the object seen, but nothing more ; its 

 form, and position, and colour, and such of the details as 

 the observer had distinctly noticed, and marked down, 

 so to speak, in his mind, would be given ; but a great 

 deal of the details would be put in by mere guess. 

 When a person draws from an object before him, he 

 measures the various lines, curves, angles, relative dis- 

 tances, and so on, with his eye, one by one, and puts them 

 down seriatim ; ever looking at the part of the original 

 on which he is working, for correction. But no possibility 

 of doing this was open to the artistic midshipman ; he 

 had merely his vivid, but necessarily vague, idea of the 

 whole before him as the original from which he drew. 

 Who is there that could carry all the details of an object 

 in the memory, after a few minutes' gaze, and that, too, 

 under strong excitement ? This was not the case even of 

 a cool professional artist, called in to view an object for 

 the purpose of depicting it ; in all probability the officer 

 had not thought of sketching it till all was over, and 

 had made no precise observations, his mind being mainly 

 occupied by wonder. He sits down, pencil in hand ; he 

 dashes in the general outline at once ; now he comes to 

 details, say the muzzle, the facial angle ; of course, his 

 figure must have some facial angle, some outline of 



