Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/756

736 Just imagine, if you can, the condition and position of the organs in this case. Let it be all right to the point where the horse joins the man; the excretions of the man, with his mass of intestines and other organs of digestion and secretion, must pass through the chest of the horse, filled with this creature's lungs and heart and great blood-vessels, involving another set of digestive and excretory organs, another form of skeleton, with the muscles, limbs, and skin of the horse. The man must eat for the horse, as his is the only mouth, which would necessitate a diet repugnant even to the most fanatic vegetarian. We naturally inquire if he must also breathe for the horse; there must be double lungs, double heart, double stomach, double intestines, double body, six limbs, long tail, hoofs and hands—a monster considerably worse than the single-bodied but six-limbed art-angels above alluded to. If we accept Hercules and Achilles, we can not accept the Centaur Chiron, their instructor.

Among other monsters created by the ancients and adopted by the moderns is Pan, the chief of the rural deities, with his attendant Fauns and Satyrs, having the head, arms, and body of a man, and the hairy lower limbs and hoofs of a goat. How they managed to walk erect on such feet, and preserve their center of gravity where it ought to be, to say nothing of the incompatibility of the human pelvis and the hircine legs in bones and muscles, is a puzzle for the physiologist. The fact that the theologic devil is usually represented very much like the god Pan, with all his inconsistencies and impossibilities, shows at once the origin and the absurdity of the idea; to his extreme ugliness, exciting a panic fear, is doubtless due the selection of his figure to represent the theologic spirit of evil, upon whose existence and domain many a spiritual panic has rested.

Neptune, the god of the seas, was represented in an immense shell drawn by impossible sea-horses, and surrounded by equally impossible Tritons, half man and half dolphin, and Nereids, half woman and half fish.

There is a large class of ancient artistic conceptions, freely copied by the moderns, not anatomically monstrous, but physically and physiologically impossible—such as Atlas supporting the globe on his shoulders; caryatides, female figures used by architects to support roofs and heavy weights; and other similar conceptions, painful to look at if we apply the tests of reason and common sense. I would say here that, in mere ornamentation, conventional representations suggestive of the intended image may be legitimately and artistically used with good effect; but if they are contrary to nature, whether on a candlestick or a church tower, they must belong to the lower spheres of art; and no metaphysical subtilty, no assumption of æsthetic culture, no aspirations after an imaginary and impossible ideal, ought, in this nineteenth century, to raise them to the highest position in art.

As the so-called ideals of the ancients must have had some things in