Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/35

Rh of the skater still closer to those of a flying, soaring being than those of the swimmer? More pleasing to me is Herr Exner's remark, which I have also made myself, that under especially favorable bodily conditions we occasionally have in dreams the inspiring illusion of soaring and flying. Thus

 . . . "in each soul is born the pleasure Of yearning onward, upward, and away, When o'er our heads, lost in the vaulted azure, The lark sends down his flickering lay; When over crags and piny highlands The poising eagle slowly soars, And over plains and lakes and islands The crane sails by to other shores."

Who would not ever and ever again with Faust strive to reach the setting sun and to see the still world in eternal twilight at his feet? But what we should be glad to do, we are glad to hear of in song and to see in pictures before our eyes. The longing to rise in the ether, to travel in the sky, and similar visions, still come to the help of the old delusion of mankind concerning the heavenly abode of the blessed away up in the starry canopy, to which Giordano Bruno put an end; but not so completely but that we sometimes fail to realize how terrible a journey in endless, airless, frigid space would be to us, in which even a swift, steadily flying eagle could only after long years light upon a planet of doubtful habitability.

What, now, can art do for science in return for so many and various services? Aside from external matters, like the representation of natural objects, it does not offer much of a different character from the reaction of the painter's experience in the mixing and combination of colors, on the doctrine of colors, an effect which is indeed not comparable with that of the retroaction of music on acoustics. The ancients had a canon of the proportions of the human body, attributed to Polycletes, which, however, as Herr Merkel has lately charged applied, to the disadvantage of many an ancient work of art, only to the grown figure; a deficiency which Gottfried Schadow first systematically remedied. This theory has lately become the foundation of a very promising branch of anthropology anthropometry in its application to the races of men.

If we extend our idea of art so as to include artistic thought and creation, there will not then be wanting relations and transitions between artist and naturalist, how far soever their paths may diverge. Yet it is not certain that an artistic conception of its problems would redound wholly to the good of natural