Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/32

22 and against the doctrine of special creations; for it is not easy to see why a free creating power should impose such limitations upon itself. So little does Nature vary from the once given type that teratology traces deformities back to it. None of these are real monstrosities; not even those with only one eye in the middle Of the forehead, in which Herr Exner looked for the original of the Cyclops, while Flaxman erroneously gave Polyphemus three eyes, a third in the forehead, besides the two normal but blind eyes. Real monsters are those invented in the youth of art by an untamed power of portrayal—winged forms, originally derived from the East: the bulls of Nimroud, the Harpies, Pegasus, the Sphinx, the griffin; Artemis, Psyche, the Notos from the Tower of the Winds, the Victory, the angels of the Semitic-Christian cycle. A third pair of extremities (and a fourth appears in Ezekiel) is not only paratypically but mechanically absurd, for the muscles needed to move them are wanting. With happy tact, Schiller has avoided, in the Battle with the Dragon, endowing the monster with the usual wings; and Retsch in his illustrations furnished it with a form so possible in comparative anatomy that one might have fancied the plesiosaurus or a zeuglodon had returned and become a land-animal.

To the winged figures may be added, as similar abominations, the Centaurs with two chests and stomachs and double viscera, and Cerberus and the hydra with many heads on many necks, warm-blooded hippocamps and Tritons, whose bodies, without hinder extremities, end in a cold-blooded fish, a conception at the thought of which even Horace was shocked. If they had had at least a horizontal tail-paddle, one might find in them a kind of cetacean. More easily borne are the cloven-footed fauns, horns, pointed ears, and hoofs of which have been inherited by our devil, whose menaces, therefore, in Franz von Kobell's witty apology, Cuvier laughed at as those of a harmless vegetable feeder. The heraldic beasts, like double eagles and unicorns, set up no claims to art, and are protected by historical prescription against the criticism they intrinsically deserve.

It is a remarkable example of the accommodating disposition of our sense of beauty, that though we are well instructed in the principles of morphology, our eyes are not more offended by some of these false creatures, such as the winged figures of Nike and the angels; and it would perhaps be pedantic and idle to forbid artists these time-honored rather symbolical representations, of which the greatest masters of the best periods have only made a very moderate use. But such indulgence has its limits. The giants in our Gigantomachia, whose thighs change at half their length into serpents, and which, instead of two legs, stand on two vertebral columns running out into heads, with separate brains,