Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/33

Rh spinal marrows, hearts, intestinal canals, lungs, kidneys, and sense-organs, are and remain an intolerable sight to the morphologically cultivated eye, and prove that, although the sculptors of Pergamon were superior in technical ability to their predecessors of the age of Pericles, they were inferior to them in refinement of artistic feeling. They were perhaps pardonable, so far as tradition bound them, for making giants with snakes' legs. The hippocamps and the Tritons with horses' legs and double fish-tails which disfigure the railings of our Schlossbrücke, come from another time, when the antique still ruled unrestrained and morphological standards were less common property than they are now. But it is a matter of deep moment to us, if a famous painter of the present suffers such monstrosities, issuing from the trunk, as sleek, sheeny salmon hardly concealing the line between the human skin and the scales, to dance realistically on the cliffs or splash around in the sea. The multitude admires such blue sea-marvels as works of genius; what a genius, then, must Höllen-Breughel have been!

Singularly enough, the primitive men in the caves of Périgord, contemporaries of the mammoth and the musk ox in France, and the Bushmen, whose paintings Herr Fritsch discovered, only painted the animals known to them as truly as they could, while the comparatively highly civilized Aztecs outran all that is Oriental in abominable inventions. It almost seems as if bad taste belonged to a certain middle stage of culture. It follows from what we have said that anatomical instruction in art schools should not be confined to osteology, myology, and the theory of human motion, but should take pains to inculcate in the pupils not a very hard thing the fundamental principles of vertebrate morphology.

It should be the task of botanists to expose the breaches of the laws of the metamorphoses of plants which meet them so frequently in the acanthus arabesques, palmettos, rosettes, and scroll ornaments that are borrowed from the antique. But for obvious reasons these offenses do not afflict the student of plants so painfully as malformations of men and animals, repulsive to a sound taste, affect the comparative anatomist. Moreover, a more wholesome turn has lately come over floral ornament. When in the Renaissance the Gothic was displaced by the antique, art was impoverished of ornamental motives. The richness of invention, the naïve observation of Nature, of which the rows of capitals in many cloisters bear witness, yielded gradually to a conventional schematism at the base of which was nothing real. But as Rauch at Carrara, instead of the eagle of a statue of Jupiter, made