4022 The Zoologist — June, 1874. 



Palmyra, the Acropolis and the Parthenon are already mending 

 the roads. When, therefore, we read of the glories of ancient art, 

 it would be mere folly to doubt their approaching annihilation 

 merely because we have now the evidence of its existence before 

 our eyes or in our hands. 



We are told that three or four thousand years ago, — that then 

 or some still earlier period, — there were paintings representing 

 fruit so accurately, so exactly like real fruit, that they had to be 

 protected by wire or some similar contrivance to prevent the 

 birds from pecking them, and thus damaging a valuable property. 

 A kindred fact has been repeatedly asserted of the portraits of 

 dogs, namely, that they were so life-like that living dogs would 

 always stop in the streets where the portraits were exhibited to try 

 conclusions with them. 



Daedalus again, whom Bell, following Spence, and Spence the 

 authors of antiquity, describes as " the most skilful artist Athens 

 or Greece ever produced," arrived at such perfection that his 

 statues were said to be animated, to see, to roll their eyes, to walk, 

 nay, would fly away unless they were chained. We who are 

 accustomed to contemplate unmoved and iu comparative in- 

 difference the pigtail of George III. in Cockspur-street, and the 

 grand equine statue in Leicester-square, seem scarcely to see the 

 necessity of this precaution, and therefore indulge a comforting 

 reflection in our immeasurable superiority : we thank Heaven we 

 are not so credulous, nor so easily " taken in." 



We are scarcely justified, however, in taking this comfort to 

 ourselves at present. Such art treasures as remain were of a later 

 date; those attributed to Phidias or Praxiteles, when art had been 

 perceptibly declining through a series of centuries, fully justify 

 the most exalted idea of their perfections, and if we could trace 

 art history ten thousand years further back than Phidias we should 

 probably find evidence of as great a deterioration in that famous 

 sculptor as we now fancy we detect between him and the great 

 Anonymus who has shed such a glory over Leicester-square. 

 Before we venture to express doubts on such a subject we should 

 at least reflect how immeasurably superior was the poetry, painting, 

 sculpture and architecture of Greece to our own, as exhibited 

 around us and in our midst, and how much better qualified was the 

 art-historian of the period to form a correct judgment than we can 

 possibly be at this remote period. Even our menial inability to 

 accept such statements, and 1 grant we cannot accept them in their 



