8 N: 40m iia Tee 
S H OR E 
Boe iee 2 as 
Sigureheads Along the North Share 
By Mary H. Northend. 
N ORDER was recently issued by Hon. George 
von L. Meyer, as Secretary of the Navy, that 
all sculptured adornments should be removed 
from the vessels of the navy. So with chisel 
and hammer, iconoclasts representing the latter-day 
spirit of progress were put at work, and one 
by one the figureheads were cut away from our 
vessels of war, leaving them bare of all decorations. 
The placing of the ornaments, worked out in sculptured 
wood and metal, gilded and illuminated lke an ancient 
missal, was merely the revival of a custom as ancient 
as the first dawn of eivilization, but which has fallen 
into disuse in our practical age, because it had nothing 
10 recommend it but sentiment. 
Thus were the early Egyptians accustomed to dee- 
So nae S ¥ 2 aif 
Figurehead in R. S. Peabody Garden, Marb'ehead 
crate the prows of their pleasure erafts, their barges, 
and their galleys of war, with images of their favorite 
Ceities and symbolic ornaments. When Cleopatra 
fioated down the river Cydnus, reclining beneath a pur- 
ple canopy, attended by cupids and naiads, and_pro- 
pelled by oars of silver, to the music of lutes and Lyres, 
we cannot doubt that her barge was decorated, along 
its prow, with carvings of the lotus flower. When the 
Kgyptian vessel of war became the prey of captors 
these ornaments were regarded as the prizes of war. 
‘orn from their places, they were carried in triumphal 
procession, when the victors returned home. 
From Egypt the practice of placing figures upon the 
prows of vessels was readily carried across the sea to 
the Phoenician coast, and to the islands and shores of 
the Aegean, and there is evidence that even the vessels 
ot Assyria and Babylonia, nations so long perished from 
the earth that their very language has been forgotten, 
bore decorations that were in keeping with national 
traits, tastes and traditions. 
In many cases, the ornamentation upon the prows 
o: war vessels in the navies of Assyria, Babylonia, and 
early Greece, took the form of the head of some animal. 
‘the ram was the favorite, and the armed prow thus 
decorated was often driven, with disastrous effect, into 
the side of the flying enemy. From this practice upon 
the water, came the inspiration to make, for use upon 
the land, a similarly armed machine for battering down 
the walls and gates of beleagured cities. Some erities 
eo so far as to assert that the famous wooden horse 
which ended the siege of Troy is but Homer’s poetical 
adaptation of this practical idea, and that the horse 
was only a battering ram employed by the Greeks to 
inake a breach in the walls of the doomed city. 
Animals were not the only subjects represented in 
these early figureheads, for a favorite design of the 
a\thenians, often placed upon the prows of their ships 
was the owl, which symbolized wisdom and secured the 
protection of Minerva. In the same way the Phoeni- 
cians, who were a nation of sailors, employed for this 
Sat TF Wh A, Bie) a ey 
Another Figure in the Peabody Garden 
purpose the figure of a cock, to signify vigilance com- 
bined with courage. We know that the Greeks often 
used as figureheads the forms of deities and demi-gods, 
for it is recorded in the Book of Acts that St. Paul took 
los departure from Melita in a vessel ‘‘whose sign was 
Jastor and Pollux.”’ . 
The custom of thus decorating the prows of vessels 
descended from these earlier peoples to the Romans, 
who often substituted for the carvings of other nations, 
