cessors; but there can be no better counteractive to this Michaelangelesque mannerism than an earnest study of the real. And a little comparative anatomy protects against such faults as that which overtook a very famous master, who made a joint too many in the hind leg of a horse; or, as we see on the Fontaine Cuvier near the Jardin des Plantes, to the diversion of the naturalist, a crocodile bending its stiff neck so far back that the snout almost touches the side of the animal.
We are, however, the less astonished at Mr. Ruskin's judgment when we learn that he also lays the same ban upon the study of the nude as upon that of anatomy. It should extend, he says, no further than health, custom, and propriety permit the exposure of the body, for which the use of anatomy would certainly be limited. It is well that propriety, custom, and health permitted more freedom on this point among the Hellenes than exists in England. Fortunately, the English department of the Jubilee Exhibition four years ago gave us opportunity to satisfy ourselves that Mr. Ruskin's dangerous paradoxes had not been carried out, and allowed us to forget them in the sight of Mr. Alma Tadema's and Mr. Herkomer's magnificent contributions. Mr. Walter Crane's charming series of pictures, which adorn our book tables, have also risen up against Mr. Ruskin's absurd doctrine.
In the same lectures Mr. Ruskin assailed the theory of selection and descent with great vigor, and attacked the censure, based upon it, of artists' pictures representing vertebrates with more than four extremities. He said: "Can any law be conceived more arbitrary or more apparently causeless? What strongly planted three-legged animals there might have been! What systematically radiant five-legged ones! What volatile six-winged ones! What circumspect seven-headed ones! Had Darwinism been true, we should long ago have split our heads in two with foolish thinking, or thrust out, from above our covetous hearts, a hundred desirous arms and clutching hands, and changed ourselves into Briarean cephalopods."[1]
It is clear from these words that this false prophet had no notion of what we in morphology call a type. Can it be necessary to tell Sir Richard Owen's and Prof. Huxley's countryman that every vertebrate has as the foundation of its body a vertebral column, expanding in front into the skull, and contracting behind into the tail; encircled in front and behind by two bone girdles, the pectoral and the pelvic arches, from which depend the fore and the hinder extremities, regularly jointed? That paleontology has never discovered a vertebrate form divergent from this type is certainly a striking argument in favor of the theory of descent
- ↑ The Eagle's Nest, p. 204.
