Certain other animals (which, like the Lamellibranchs, all have a shell divided into two valves) form another still lower class called Brachiopoda, a class which we may, at least provisionally, consider as belonging to the mollusca. These Brachiopods are also called "Lamp-shells," from a certain resemblance which many of them show to the form of a classical lamp. They are interesting, because in very ancient times they seem to have held that place in the world's animal population which is now held by the Lamellibranchs, by which, as they died out, they have been gradually replaced till but comparatively few forms survive. Some of these, however, are of great antiquity, and one of them, Lingula, is, though still living, one of the most ancient of all known animals.

We may next pass to a small sub-kingdom which includes the curious and inert animals before referred to[16] as "Sea-squirts," Tunicaries or Ascidians, and which constitute the sub-kingdom TUNICATA. These are marine organisms of very simple but very peculiar structure which sometimes grow up in compound aggregations. Certain forms (e.g., Pyrosoma) are luminous at night and may be seen swimming about in the ocean like so many red-hot urn-heaters. As we shall hereafter see, the reproductive processes and the earlier stages of existence of these creatures possess much interest, and have afforded strong grounds for regarding them, in spite of their lowly organization, as very close allies of the highest animals or Vertebrata.

Returning now to the "lobster" (lately mentioned as one of those animals commonly called "shell-fish") we may regard it as an example of what is by far the most numerous of all the sub-kingdoms of animals. This sub-kingdom is made up of animals with jointed feet or "Arthropods," and the ARTHROPODA are subdivided into four classes—1, Crustacea; 2, Myriapoda; 3, Arachnida; and 4, Insecta; and it is to the first of these four classes that the lobster belongs.

The class Crustacea contains, besides the lobster (and its near allies, hermit-crabs, prawns, shrimps, and cray-fish), all crabs, including those very quaint-looking animals (now so often seen in our living collections), the king-crabs (Limulus), and a variety of more or less strangely different forms such as the following:—

Certain Crustaceans, of the group called Ostracods, have the hard outer coat of their body so peculiarly modified that they have quite the appearance of Lamellibranch Mollusks, and this resemblance is even more than skin deep, as we shall see later.

Some of another group, called Copepoda, become, when adult, so degraded in structure as to have the appearance of mere worms, as Lerneocera and Tracheliastes, and become strangely unlike the typical forms (crabs and lobsters) of their class.

Other animals of the class Crustacea, which animals form the order Cirripedia (barnacles and acorn-shells), bear such an external resemblance to mollusks that they were actually classed by Cuvier in the class Mollusca. In some of them—the Barnacles which commonly attach themselves to the bottoms of ships—the head grows from above downwards to a relatively enormous degree, forming the long stalk or "peduncle," at the lower end of which the small body with its limbs hangs suspended.

In another group, Rhizocephala, the form of the adult becomes yet more strange. These creatures are parasitic on other crustacea. Having attached themselves to the surface of the soft abdomen of the Hermit crab, the head of the Rhizocephalon grows out into it as so many root-like processes, from which condition the group has received its name.

The numerous and long extinct group of Trilobites also belongs to the class Crustacea.

The next class, Myriopoda, consists of the hundred-legs (centipedes), and thousand-legs (millipedes), which present us with some of the best examples of creatures the bodies of which are composed of a longitudinal series of similar segments. Allied to them is a very exceptional animal found in Africa and New Zealand, and called Peripatus, the anatomy of which presents many significant peculiarities.

The third class of Arthropods (Arachnida) consists of the scorpions and spiders with their poor relations, the mites and tics, together with the very peculiarly-shaped Pycnogonida (which present us with a good image of "no body"—being all legs and no body), and the singular worm-like parasite Linguatula. Lastly, we come to the most zoologically important and numerous of all the classes of Arthropods—namely, to the "class" of insects—Insecta. Therein we meet with the power of flight in its most perfect form—i.e., in the Dragon-flies—and most of the species are aerial in their adult (or Imago) condition. Some, however, are burrowers as, for example, the mole-cricket—an insect which presents some curious analogies in structure to the beast referred to in its name. Amongst insects may be mentioned the most familiar of all, the House-fly (which belongs to the order Diptera), and Beetles of all kinds (which constitute the order Coleoptera), some of which latter are luminous, as is the well-known glow-worm, and the exotic beetles Pyrophorus. Another order (Orthoptera) is made up of the earwigs, cockroaches, crickets, grass-hoppers, and their allies the locusts, with Bamboo-insects and the curious walking-leaf (so-called from their resemblance to a Bamboo twig and a foliage leaf respectively), the praying mantis, and other curious kinds.

Bees and Ants, which belong to the order Hymenoptera, are, as every one knows, celebrated for their wonderfully complex instincts and community-life (which will occupy us later), and to the same order also belong the Ichneumon insects, which are provided with long appendages at the hinder ends of their bodies wherewith to pierce the bodies of animals in order to deposit their eggs within them, or to pierce the substance of plants, so producing "galls" which are structures of much interest from several points of view.

Butterflies and Moths form another order of insects called Lepidoptera, amongst which may be mentioned as (having to be referred to hereafter) the true butterflies (Papilio), and the hawkmoths (some of which in their flight so much resemble Humming-birds), the clear-wing moths, and those moths the grubs of which are known as "silk-worms," and certain moths of the genera Solenobia and Psyche.

The numerous group of bugs is allied to the plant-lice (Aphides), which so often infest our Pelargoniums when kept in dwelling-rooms. Allied to them, again, are the small creatures the nature of which was so long disputed, though familiar to commerce as "Cochineal." Really, they are small, singularly inert, plant-lice, which adhere to the surface of certain "Cacti."

The Dragon-flies, before referred to, are the types of the order Neuroptere.

All the insects above mentioned, save the House-fly, have four wings, or else none; but that familiar form may serve as the type of the two-winged order (Diptera) to which belong all flies and gnats—including, of course, the Mosquito—and the numerous "Bots," one of which (the Tsee-Tsee fly) is so fatal to cattle in Africa.

Finally, amongst insects may be mentioned the wingless, but active order of fleas (Aphaniptera), the wingless but sluggish lice (Aptera), and the jumping and wingless springtails (Thysanura).

In leaving the class of insects, we leave all the more highly-organized Invertebrata. But the next group to which we may direct our attention is one which is exceedingly numerous, and contains a very varied assemblage of forms. This group is the "sub-kingdom" of Worms, VERMES. First amongst its contents may be mentioned the higher or true "worms," such as the earth-worm (Lumbricus), the leech (Hirudo), the sea-mouse (Aphrodite), and their allies, together with the worms which live in tubes, which are called Tubicolous-"Annelids," because the whole class of these higher worms bears the name Annelida.

In this connexion may be mentioned certain exceptional vermiform creatures, about the affinities of which naturalists dispute.

One of these is a marine creature (called Sagitta, from the way in which it shoots like an arrow through the water), which has many affinities to Arthropods.

Another is a most remarkable worm, which has been found in the Bay of Naples, and is called Balanoglossus. It is the type of a group called Enteropneusta. To it reference will have again and again to be made on account of certain singularities in its structure.

A very distinct class of creatures is termed Bryozoa (or Polyzoa), and is composed of very minute animals which live in compound aggregations, and often grow up in an arborescent manner. The common sea-mat (Flustra) is one example of the class, and another—a good type—is called Plumatella. The Bryozoa have many affinities with the Mollusca, to which some naturalists consider them to belong.

Other worms form the class Nematoidea, of which many are parasitic and many not so. Amongst the better known of the former may be mentioned the worms which tease children (Ascarides), the guinea-worm (Filaria), the scourge of Germans who eat raw meat (Trichina), the deadly blood-parasite of the Nile (Bilharzia), and many others.

Another class (Trematoda) is made up of parasites called "Flukes," to some of which (e.g., Monostomum) reference will have hereafter to be made with respect to their processes of development.

The class Turbellaria contains a variety of other worms of a lowly kind, one or two of which (e.g., Borlesia) live coiled up in complex tangles which, if unravelled, would attain a length of forty feet. Amongst the commoner kinds may be mentioned the worm Nemertes, and all worms called Planariae (which are mostly fresh-water, though some live on land), allied to the flukes.

The class of tape-worms (Cestoidea) is one most numerous in its kinds, which are all completely parasitic in habit. Some of them are so fatal in their effects that they are estimated to occasion every seventh death which occurs in Iceland, and they cause mortality amidst our own flocks, producing in sheep the disease known as the "staggers."

Certain minute organisms, familiarly known as "Wheel-Animalcules," or Rotifers, form the "class" Rotifera. They have gained their name through an apparently (though, of course, not really) rotary motion, of that end of their bodies at which the mouth is situated. Here also may be mentioned certain curious aquatic worms called Gasterotricha, which are closely allied to the wheel animalcules.

Finally may be mentioned the class Gephyrea, containing animals, worm-like indeed in form, but which have much apparent affinity to the group next to be spoken of—the group of star-fishes and their allies. Amongst the Gephyrea may be mentioned the worms called Sipunculus and Priapulus.

This leads us to the sub-kingdom containing the star-fishes—the sub-kingdom ECHINODERMA, which includes, besides the star-fishes (or Asteridea), all sea-eggs or sea-urchins (Echinidea), the brittle-stars Ophiuridea, as well as the elongated soft animals called sea-cucumbers, or Holothuridea, some of which latter are known as the Japanese edible, "Trepang."

Besides these groups there are still surviving a few creatures (Comatula and Pentacrinus) belonging to the class of "sea-lilies," or Crinoidea, creatures which once lived in countless multitudes, but have now almost entirely passed away. All these crinoids were like star-fishes on stalks, and of the existing forms, Pentacrinus still passes the whole of its life, and Comatula its youth, in a stalked condition.

The next great primary division, or sub-kingdom of animals, is COELENTERA, and a good type of the coelenterates, the sea anemone (Actinia), has now become a familiar object to us in our aquaria. These animals are plant-animals, or zoophytes, and some of them build up coral-reefs, or islands, and it is one kind which produces the red coral of commerce. Forms essentially similar, but the solid supporting framework of which is of a softer nature, are such as Alcyonium and Pennatula. All these belong to the "class" Actinozoa. There are other coelenterates of an active free-swimming habit, such as Beroee and Cydippe, which are balls of glassy transparency displaying iridescent hues as they move rapidly through the water by means of their peculiar locomotive organs.

Other coelenterates, of the same essential type but of simpler structure, form the class Hydrozoa. Amongst these may be mentioned the little Hydra of our ponds, which will often come before us in our survey of animal life. Some compound forms of Hydrozoa simulate the compound Actinozoa; such are the calcareous millipores, and those with a softer structure, called "corallines," such as Eudendrium and many others. The Portuguese man-of-war (Physalia) and the various forms of jelly-fish (Medusae) all belong to the Hydrozoa, as also does a very curious and very elementary form, to which the name Tetraplatia has been given.

Next we come to the group of sponges, SPONGIDA, some of which—as the now well-known Euplectella—are of marvellous beauty and delicacy of structure; while others, as the sponge of commerce, are of much greater simplicity of form. Simplest of all the sponges is the sponge called Ascetta Primordialis. Some sponges have a horny, some a calcareous, and some a siliceous skeleton, and (strange as it may appear) some have a habit of boring into shells, and living in the excavations they make.

An animal recently discovered, Dicyema, may at this initial stage of our inquiry be left with its place and affinities undetermined. It is a minute worm-like creature of most exceptionally simple structure, which lives parasitically within cuttle-fishes.

We now pass to animals (if so they are really to be considered) which are the lowest and simplest of all, and which are mostly microscopic in size, and may be grouped together under the term HYPOZOA, or under the generally employed name Protozoa. With very few exceptions these animals are aquatic, and if terrestrial they are found in damp localities. Some are marine, others are fresh-water organisms.

The highest of the group are the animalcules, which are named Infusoria, most of which are freely swimming organisms, though a certain number of them live fixed to some supporting body.

Another group of Hypozoa is that termed Gregarinida, a group made up of very lowly parasites, such as are often found tenanting the intestines of insects as well as those of higher animals. Finally, we have the group of Rhizopoda, animals which have the faculty of projecting and retracting (so to say, at will) filamentary or conical processes of their semi-fluid substance, such processes being the Pseudopodia, which were referred to earlier.[17]

Amongst the Rhizopoda, the most complex and beautiful are the delicate and symmetrical creatures known as Radiolaria,[18] the siliceous skeletons of which are amongst the most remarkable of microscopic objects.

Allied to them are the simpler Heliozoa, of which the after-mentioned Actinophrys may be taken as a type.

Next come the Flagellata, or minute creatures which swim about by means of one or two whip-like processes, whence the name of the group.

Last of all is the group of Foraminifera, animals which are well worthy of note, seeing that, though they are each but as it were a minute particle of structureless jelly, they manage to build most complexly-formed, generally calcareous, shells, or to pick up from the sand of the sea minute particles, which they agglutinate around them with marvellous neatness and precision. Their calcareous shells are generally pierced by a multitude of minute pores, through which the little creatures protrude their pseudopodia. It is from these pores (or foramina) that the group receives its name. All Foraminifera, however, are not provided with shells. Some, as the Amoeba, are naked, and the simplest of all animals, Protogenes and Protamoeba, consist of but a minute particle of semi-fluid jelly, or protoplasm, naked and as devoid of every external protection as it is of internal organization.

We have thus descended to the bottom of the animal kingdom, and passing from these rudimentary forms, which are generally reckoned as animals, we may next survey in ascending order the different organisms which together compose the kingdom of Plants, a group much less rich in species than is the animal kingdom.

At the bottom of that kingdom are very simple creatures, but little different, to all appearance, from the lowest animals. As an example of such we may take the minute plant Protococcus, which is an humble member of the great group of Algae, to which all sea-weeds belong. Not all of this important tribe, however, are marine. Many are found in fresh water—such as the protococcus itself, and many of the green vegetable threads known as Conferrae. Some even live on land, and draw their moisture from the atmosphere. The Algae are exceedingly varied in their structure; some, like the protococcus, being of extreme simplicity; others attaining a large size, and presenting the appearance of a stout stem with branches and leaves.

The Algae are divisible into the green-spored[19] (Chlorospermeae), the rose-spored (Florideae), and the olive-spored (Melanospermeae).

It is in the first division that the Protococcus may be placed, as also those microscopic plants called Diatoms and Desmids. The former, the Diatomaceae, are a very numerous group of minute organisms, some of which are used as test objects for microscopes. They contain in their outer coat or case a relatively large portion of silex, and their remains here and there form deposits—vast beds many feet in thickness—known as "tripoli," and used for polishing. The minute particle of their protoplasm is contained within the siliceous case. They may be entirely free, or cohere in aggregations, or be attached to a supporting surface by a slender stalk, which may ramify and bear a little siliceous case or "frustule" at the end of each branch.

The desmids (or Desmidiaceae) are green and devoid of silex, though their protoplasm is enclosed in hard or flexible cases, often marked with beautiful and characteristic patterns.

Both diatoms and desmids may cohere together, forming more complex masses; but another creature allied to Protococcus is noted for its mode of cohesion. This is the microscopic plant Volvox, the individuals of which cohere so as to form spheroidal aggregations, which swim about by the action of filamentary prolongations of their protoplasm, such prolongations reminding us of the pseudopodia of radiolarians and other rhizopods.

Amongst these simplest plants may be also mentioned the curious thread-like organisms, which, on account of their remarkable and as yet unexplained movements, are called Oscillatoriae.

Another curious vegetable organism which may here be mentioned is Vaucheria. It is a green, thread-like plant, which may be several inches long, and which at one stage of its existence (when it is what is called a "spore") swims about by pseudopodial prolongations of its protoplasm.

Some few of the Chlorospermeae are large and conspicuous organisms. Such, e.g., is Caulerpa, which abounds on warm, sandy coasts, and on which turtles browse. Though, as we shall hereafter see, it is really as simple in structure as a particle of yeast, it yet presents a very complicated external figure.

Some of the great group of Algae attain enormous dimensions. Thus, Macrocystis (one of the Melanospermae), of the Southern Ocean, may be even 700 feet in length. Another kind, Lessonia, forms submarine forests, with stems like the trunks of trees.

The group of Floridiae includes the delicate and elegant sea-weeds, which are amongst the most admired vegetable productions of our coasts. They are of interest, on account of various peculiarities in their reproductive processes.

Other lowly plants may, at least provisionally, be placed in the great group to which mushrooms and truffles belong—the group of Fungi—a group the members of which agree in certain exceptional phenomena of function,[20] as well as of structure and composition—as they are exceptionally nitrogenous.

Amongst the lowest which we may for convenience provisionally include in this group may be mentioned minute Vibrios, such as the Bacteria so much talked of in connexion with spontaneous generation, and the small plant which by its growth produces fermentation—the yeast-plant (Saccharomyces).[21] Closely allied to the yeast-plant are the "moulds" which grow on organic matters such as Penicillium, Mucor, Saprolegna, Phytophthora, the last of which is the potato disease.

A singular group of organisms goes by the name of Myxomycetes. These enigmatical creatures have been classed in turn as animals and as plants, and, indeed, at one period of their existence they seem to have more resemblance to the former, while at another stage of their life history they must unquestionably be ranked as plants. When young, they are in a semi-fluid condition, and so move that they seem, as it were, to flow over the body on which they rest. They grow upon the bark of trees or on leaves and decayed wood. They exhibit movements like those of the amaebae and are said to engulph nutritious matters which come in their way.

The dry-looking, green, grey, red or yellow vegetable structures which encrust our rocks, walls, and trees, and which are called Lichens, form a group of plants curiously intermediate between Fungi and Algae.

Plants somewhat higher in the scale of vegetable life are those which are termed liverworts (Hepaticae), including the scale-mosses (Jungermanniaceae) and Marchantia. These plants, as we shall see, are interesting on account of the variations to be found in the forms of different genera. In many, there is no stem, but only a connected series of green disk-like expansions, while others have a distinct stem with leaf-like outgrowths.

Two genera of aquatic plants (Chara and Nitella) constitute another group of plants called Characeae. These will be hereafter referred to both on account of peculiarities in their structure and on account of a peculiar motion of protoplasm which is easily to be seen[22] in them.

Mosses (Musci) are familiar objects to every one in this country, and allied to them are the so-called "club-mosses" or Lycopods, which form a sort of green sward in so many parts of the warmer regions of the earth. To one of the lycopods, called Selaginella, reference will hereafter be made in connexion with its very instructive reproductive process.

Certain humble plants, in some of which the foliage leaves present a superficial resemblance to those of a four-leaved clover, are popularly called pepperworts; by botanists, Rhizocarpeae or Marsiliaceae. They are creeping or floating stemless plants which inhabit ditches or inundated places. They are scattered over both the Old and New Worlds, but are chiefly found in temperate latitudes.

The horse-tails (Equisetaceae) are also found in most parts of the world, though wanting in Australia and New Zealand. They inhabit wet and sandy places, and sometimes are of a considerable size even in the present day, but in ancient geological periods they attained the proportions of trees.

This group leads us on to their allies the ferns which form a very large natural group Filices or Pteridophytes—a group now familiar to every one interested in plants. Common as ferns are in our own country, they are far more abundant and attain to a much greater size in southern latitudes—notably in New Zealand and various Pacific islands.

All the plants hitherto enumerated, from the protococcus to the tree-ferns inclusive, together form what is commonly regarded as one great primary division or "sub-kingdom" of vegetals called CRYPTOGAMIA. In no plant belonging to this sub-kingdom—in no single cryptogam—is any flower ever developed. These form the great group which is often spoken of as "flowerless plants."

The other primary division of vegetable organisms consists of all plants with flowers, and is termed PHANEROGAMIA, and is subdivided into two sections,[23] very unequally numerous. To the first section of phanerogams—a section containing comparatively few kinds—belong all firs, pines, yews, junipers, araucarias, and a most remarkable African plant, Welwitschia, which has never more than two leaves, though these attain enormous dimensions. All these plants are collectively spoken of as conifers, or Coniferae. Besides these, certain curious southern forms called Cycads are also associated in this section. To this section, thus composed of conifers and cycads, the name GYMNOSPERMS is given, from the naked mode of development of their young seeds. These gymnosperms are also characterized by having such peculiar and inconspicuous flowers that the ordinary observer would hardly apply that term to denote their floral organs.

All the plants which yet remain to be noticed, and which belong to the second and very much larger section of the PHANEROGAMIA are spoken of as Angiosperms. Their seeds are, from their first appearance, in a very different condition from those of gymnosperms, and their flowers are generally conspicuous. To this group, therefore, belong all the familiar ornamental plants of our gardens, and all the brightly coloured natural ornaments of our fields, as well as a number of herbs and trees, the flowers of which, though truly flowers, are not commonly recognized as such.

This group of Angiospermous flowering plants is divided into a great number of natural groups or "orders." Of these there are about 275, and they are grouped in two sets or classes, which are separated one from another, as we shall hereafter see, by differences as to their modes of growth, the structure of their seeds, the numbers of the parts of their flowers, and the course of the veins in their leaves.

First amongst the Angiospermous flowering plants may be mentioned the grasses forming the order Gramineae, including under that term the tree-like bamboos (of multitudinous uses), with the rice plant, and all the grain-bearing herbs, all of which are grasses. Thus, with much reason may it be said of man, that "all flesh is grass;" for with the exception of the piscivorous Esquimaux, the exclusively flesh-eating Gouchos, the population of Australia, and the people of the Molluccas who nourish themselves on sago—which is the produce of a palm—with these and a few more exceptions, the staple food of the human race is one or another form of grass. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that men of such varied races so widely spread should have thus selected as their food objects so little tempting in appearance, and so small and so inconspicuous as the seeds of grasses!

Allied to the grasses are the sedges (forming the order Cyperaceae), and the rushes (Juncaceae). The apparently insignificant, but really interesting duckweeds (Pistiaceae) should also be noted with the bullrushes (Typheae), and the arums (Aroideae). This last-mentioned order, familiar to us by the kind known as "Lords and Ladies," presents some climbing forms in tropical countries. Generally acrid, some species, when in flower, even produce headache and vomiting; at least an explorer was attacked with these symptoms after gathering forty specimens of Arum dracunculus. The order is also interesting from experiments as to vegetable heat, which have been made with the flowers of some of its species.

The screw-pines (Pandanaceae) are not "pines" at all, any more than "pine-apples" are pines. They are, indeed, trees or shrubs, which, from one point of view, may be regarded as gigantic bulrushes. The flowers of certain species are in some places eaten as the solid equivalent of a love potion. Allied to the plants of the last-mentioned order are the palms (Palmaceae), which are the first really large trees we come to after leaving the tree-ferns and the gymnosperms. Amongst the more noteworthy palms may be mentioned the palmetto (Chamaerops) of Southern Europe (a summer ornament of our public gardens), the date palm, the areca palm, the sago palm, the cocoa palm, the rattan palm—a natural cordage—and Seaforthia, so remarkable for its graceful and elegant form.

Next may be enumerated the great order of lilies (Liliaceae), to which the homely and useful onion, leek, garlic, chive, and asparagus belong, no less than a multitude of lovely flowers.

The New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax), and all the magnificent yuccas and aloes, together with our English butcher's broom (Ruscus aculeatus), which has not a little botanical interest (as being the only British shrub which belongs to the group called "Monocotyledons") also belong to this order. Closely allied to the lilies are the amaryllids (Amaryllidaceae), amongst which are the agaves, with their gigantic flower stems, sometimes forty feet high, supporting a multitudinous crop of flowers, the product and termination of a life.

To these follow the pine-apples (Bromeliaceae) all originally from America, the useful bananas and plantains (Musaceae), and the ginger-plants (Zingiberaceae), tropical herbs, generally of great beauty.

The underground parts of certain tropical plants (Dioscoreaceae) are known as "yams." A representative of this order exists in England in the climbing black bryony (Tamus) of our hedges, and to the same group belongs the very singularly stemmed elephant's foot, or tortoise-tree (Testudinaria elephantipes). The last-named plant is a native of the Cape of Good Hope, where it has been known as Hottentot's bread, because the soft interior of its swollen base was at one time eaten by the natives of that region, who have, however, now abandoned it to the baboons.

Lastly, in this connexion may be mentioned the very interesting and beautiful group of orchids (Orchidaceae), many of which live high up in the air, supported on the branches of trees, from which their roots hang freely down. Such orchids are sometimes spoken of as "air-plants."

All the Angiosperms as yet mentioned, from the grasses to the orchids inclusively, belong to the lower of the two great groups or classes into which, as was lately said, the whole mass of Angiosperms is divided.

This great group is named Monocotyledones (on account of the structure of the seed), and it is sometimes spoken of as Endogens, in reference to a generally prevalent habit of growth. The members of this whole class will then hereinafter be spoken of as "Monocotyledons."

All the plants which yet remain to be enumerated belong to the other and still greater group of Angiosperms called (also in reference to their seeds) Dicotyledons, a group sometimes spoken of as "Exogens," in reference to the habit of growth prevalent amongst its species.

All our familiar trees which are not conifers, and most of our flowering shrubs and herbs, are "Dicotyledons."

Amongst the many orders which compose the Dicotyledonous group the few following may be selected for enumeration, either on account of the general interest they possess, or because they will have to be more or less referred to hereafter.

We may thus note the singular order of vegetable parasites, the Loranthaceae, an order containing some thirty genera with four hundred species, and including the mistletoe, which is traditionally venerable in our island. The great group of catkin-bearing trees (Amentaceae), contains a great assemblage of plants, familiar in England, such as the hornbeam, hazel, oak, beech, Spanish chestnut, birch, willow, poplar, &c.[24]

The largest and one of the most remarkable flowers in the world, Rafflesia—a parasite found in Java and Sumatra by Sir Stamford Raffles—is the type of the small order Rafflesiaceae. The eccentric pitcher-bearing plants form the order Nepenthaceae. The English herb called "Spurge" (with its milky juice), belongs to the order (Euphorbiaceae), which is a large[25] cosmopolitan group, some species of the plants belonging to which attain, in hot countries, the size of trees. Certain African species strangely resemble different kinds of Cactus. The elm order (Ulmaceae) may come next. The hop, the hemp, the mulberry, the fig, and the dorstenia are all nearly allied, the first two belonging to the order Cannabinaceae, the last three to the Moraceae. The bread-fruit of the South-Sea Islands belongs to the same order (Artocarpaceae) as does the deadly upas-tree of Java. Garments made of the inner bark of this plant are like the shirt of Nessus, and will produce intolerable irritation; and even climbing the tree to obtain its flowers is said to have produced severe effects on the climber. In proximity to the last-mentioned plant comes appropriately (as also in its proper botanical order) the group of stinging-nettles (Urticaceae). The curious Australian plants which delighted the eyes of Captain Cook's botanical companions belong to the order Proteaceae. Besides these may be mentioned the dead-nettle order (Labiatae); the broom-rapes (Orobanchaceae); the order of snap-dragons and foxgloves (Scrophularineae); the potato group (Solanaceae), which includes the deadly nightshade and the dulcamara of our hedges; the parasitic order (Cuscutaceae); the beautiful group of convolvuluses (Convolvulaceae); the gentians (Gentianaceae); the primrose group (Primulaceae); the heaths (Ericaceae); the graceful hair-bell and its allies (Campanulaceae); the very large group to which belong the daisy, dandelion, and thistle (Compositae); the honeysuckle order (Caprifoliaceae); the ivy (Araliaceae); the large order containing the fennel, hemlock, and a multitude of other forms which, though mostly ranking as herbs, attain gigantic dimensions in some species found in Africa and Kamskatka (Umbelliferae); the very singularly-shaped group of cactuses (Cactaceae), with leafless fleshy stems, which sometimes look like dry columns and sometimes are globular; the begonias (Begoniaceae); the cucumbers, melons, and vegetable marrows (Cucurbitaceae); the singularly-formed passion-flowers (Passifloraceae); the myrtles (Myrtaceae); the carnivorous group containing the sundew and Venus's flytrap (Droseracae); the fleshy houseleek and stonecrops (Crassulaceae); the Saxifrages (Saxifragaceae); the rose group (Rosaceae), which includes within it most of our fruits, such as the apple, pear, strawberry, cherry, peach, plum, almond, and others; the very large order which contains the peas, beans, and their allies (Leguminoseae); the horse-chestnut order (Hippocastaneae); the maples (Acerineae); the hollies (Ilicineae); the oranges and citrons (Aurantiaceae); the cranesbills and pelargoniums (Geraniaceae); the flaxes (Linaceae); the limes (Tiliaceae), in which the useful jute is included; the mallows (Malvaceae); the St. John's worts (Hypericaceae); the order of pinks (Caryophylleae); the pansies (Violaceae); the rock-roses (Cistaceae); the mignonette group (Resedaceae); the great wall-flower and cabbage group (Cruciferae); the poppies (Papaveraceae); the water-lilies (Nymphaceae); the berberries (Berberideae); the custard-apples (Anonaceae); the magnolias (Magnoliaceae); and, finally, the great group (Ranunculaceae) containing the anemones, the clematis, hellebore, monkshood, and the buttercup, which last is of great use to the student of Botany because it is an excellent type of all flowers.

The above may serve as a brief enumeration of the more generally known or more interesting orders of flowering plants, as also of the most noteworthy forms of cryptogams. The much more numerous and complex groups of animals have also been catalogued in the earlier and larger part of this Essay, which may thus, it is hoped, answer the purpose of an introduction to those multitudinous forms of organic life, the leading points in the structure and functions of which are hereafter to occupy us.

The main groups of Animals and Plants may be provisionally tabulated as follows:—

ANIMALS.

{ Mammalia (Man and Beasts) (1) VERTEBRATA { Aves (Birds) (Back-boned { Reptilia (Serpents, Crocodiles, Lizards, &c.) Animals) { Batrachia (Frogs, Efts, &c.) { Pisces (Fishes)

{ Cephalopoda (Cuttle Fishes) (2) MOLLUSCA { Pteropoda (Soft Animals) { Gasteropoda (Snails, &c.) { Lamellibranchiata (Oysters, &c.) { Brachiopoda (Lamp-shells)

(3) TUNICATA (Ascidians, Tunicaries, or Sea-squirts)

(4) ARTHROPODA { Crustacea (Crabs, &c.) (Animals with { Myriapoda (Hundred-legs, &c.) jointed feet) { Arachnida (Scorpions, Spiders, &c.) { Insecta

{ Annelida (Earth-worms, Leeches, &c.) { Enteropneusta (Balanoglossus) { Bryozoa (Sea-mat, &c.) { Nematoidea (Thread-worms) (5) VERMES { Trematoda (Flukes, &c.) { Turbellaria (Planariae, &c.) { Cestoidea (Tape-worms) { Rotifera (Wheel-animalcules) { Gasterotricha { Gephyrea (Sipunculus, &c.)

(6) ECHINODERMA (Star-fishes, &c.)

{ Ctenophora (Beroee, &c.) (7) COELENTERA { Actinozoa (Coral animals) { Hydrozoa (Jelly-fishes, &c.)

(8) SPONGIDA (Sponges)

{ Infusoria (Animalcules with mouths) (9) HYPOZOA { Gregarinida { Rhizopoda (Foraminifers, Radiolarians, Flagellata, &c.)

PLANTS.

{ Algae (Sea-weeds, Confervae, &c.) { Fungi { Lichenes (1) CRYPTOGAMIA { Hepaticae (Liverworts and Scale-mosses) (Flowerless { Characeae (Nitella, &c.) Plants) { Musci (Mosses) { Marsiliaceae (Pepperworts) { Equisetaceae (Horsetails) { Filices (Ferns)

(2) PHANEROGAMIA { A. Gymnosperms (Firs, Yews, Cycads, &c.) (Flowering { { Monocotyledones (Grasses, Palms, Lilies, Plants) { B. Angiosperms { Orchids, &c.) { { Dicotyledones (the great mass of Flowering { { Plants and Trees).

ST. GEORGE MIVART.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, May, 1879, p. 261.

[5] L. c. p. 262.

[6] "A classification of any large portion of the field of Nature, in conformity to the foregoing principles, has hitherto been found practicable only in one great instance, that of animals."—Logic, third edition, 1851, vol. i., chap. viii. Sec. 5, page 279.

[7] CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, July, 1879, pp. 716 and 717.

[8] L. c. p. 717.

[9] CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, July, 1879: "What are Living Beings?"

[10] Very small deer, commonly called in error musk-deer.

[11] The European beavers have abandoned the dam-building habit. They retained it, however, as late as the thirteenth century.

[12] By the Author in a Paper read before the Zoological Society in Nov. 1864. See also his "Man and Apes," Hardwicke, 1873; and the article "Ape" in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol. ii. p. 148.

[13] "Histoire Naturelle," tome xiv. p. 61, 1766.

[14] For an explanation of the zoological system of nomenclature which has been adopted since the time of Linnaeus, see CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for May, page 262.

[15] See ante, p. 14.

[16] See CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for July, p. 710.

[17] See CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, July, p. 710.

[18] For a summary of our knowledge respecting this group, see the "Linnean Society's Journal," Vol. xiv. (Zoology), p. 136.

[19] A "spore" is a minute reproductive particle.

[20] See CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for July, 1879, p. 714.

[21] Some botanists think that yeast is no true and definite kind of plant, but that it is only a conglomeration of fungoid spores of divers sorts.

[22] This motion is that referred to at the bottom of page 696, in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for July, 1879, as Cyclosis.

[23] Some readers may be startled at the mode here adopted of primarily dividing the Phanerogams, and may object to it as opposed to usage; but reasons will be given later for the mode of division here adopted.

[24] The above-named plants may for our purpose be thus conveniently grouped together, according to the older fashion of botanists. Strictly speaking, however, they should be divided amongst several orders—e.g., hazel and hornbeam (Corylaceae), the oak, beech, and chestnut (Capuliferae), the birches (Betulaceae), the willows (Salicaceae), &c.

[25] Containing upwards of 2500 species.



THE ARTISTIC DUALISM OF THE RENAISSANCE.

I.

Into the holy enclosure which had received the precious shiploads of earth from Calvary, the Pisans of the thirteenth century carried the fragments of ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from Greece; and in the Gothic cloister enclosing the green sward and dark cypresses of the grave-yard of Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first time face to face with the art of antiquity. There, among pagan sarcophagi turned into Christian tombs, with heraldic devices chiselled on to their arabesques and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the great unsigned artist of the fourteenth century, be he Sienese or Florentine, be he Orcagna, Lorenzetti, or Volterra, painted the typical masterpiece of mediaeval art, the great fresco of the Triumph of Death. With wonderful realization of character and situation he painted the prosperous of the world, the dapper youths and damsels seated with dogs and falcons beneath the orchard trees, amusing themselves with Decameronian tales and sound of lute and psaltery, unconscious of the gigantic scythe wielded by the gigantic dishevelled Death, and which, in a second, will descend and mow them to the ground; but the crowd of beggars, ragged, maimed, paralyzed, leprous, grovelling on their withered limbs, see and implore Death, and cry stretching forth their arms, their stumps, and their crutches. Further on, three kings in long embroidered robes and gold-trimmed shovel caps, Lewis the Emperor, Uguccione of Pisa, and Castruccio of Lucca, with their retinue of ladies and squires, and hounds and hawks, are riding quietly through a wood. Suddenly their horses stop, draw back; the Emperor's bay stretches out his long neck sniffing the air; the kings strain forward to see, one holding his nose for the stench of death which meets him; and before them are three open coffins, in which lie, in three loathsome stages of corruption, from blue and bloated putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three crowned corpses. This is the triumph of Death; the grim and horrible jest of the Middle Ages: equality in decay; kings, emperors, ladies, knights, beggars, and cripples, this is what we all come to be, stinking corpses; Death, our lord, our only just and lasting sovereign, reigns impartially over all.

But opposite, all along the sides of the painted cloister, the amazons are wrestling with the youths on the stone of the sarcophagi; the chariots are dashing forward, the Tritons are splashing in the marble waves; the Bacchantae are striking their timbrels in their dance with the satyrs; the birds are pecking at the grapes, the goats are nibbling at the vines, all is life, strong and splendid in its marble eternity. And the mutilated Venus smiles towards the broken Hermes; the stalwart Hercules, resting against his club, looks on quietly, a smile beneath his beard; and the gods murmur to each other, as they stand in the cloister filled with earth from Calvary, where hundreds of men lie rotting beneath the cypresses, "Death will not triumph for ever; our day will come."

We have all seen them opposite to each other, these two arts, the art born of antiquity and the art born of the Middle Ages; but whether this meeting was friendly or hostile or merely indifferent, is a question of constant dispute. To some, mediaeval art has appeared being led, Dante-like, by a magician Virgil through the mysteries of Nature up to a Christian Beatrice, who alone can guide it to the kingdom of heaven; others have seen mediaeval art, like some strong, chaste knight turning away resolutely from the treacherous sorceress of antiquity, and pursuing solitarily the road to the true and the good; for some the antique has been an impure goddess Venus, seducing and corrupting the Christian artist; the antique has been for others a glorious Helen, an unattainable perfection, ever pursued by the mediaeval craftsman, but seized by him only as a phantom. Magician or witch, voluptuous, destroying Venus or cold and ungrasped Helen, what was the antique to the art born of the Middle Ages and developed during the Renaissance? Was the relation between them that of tuition, cool and abstract, or of fruitful lore, or of deluding and damning example?

The art which came to maturity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was generated in the early mediaeval revival. The seeds may, indeed, have come down from antiquity, but they remained for nearly a thousand years hidden in the withered, rotting remains of former vegetation, and it was not till that vegetation had completely decomposed and become part of the soil, it was not till putrefaction had turned into germination, that artistic organism timidly reappeared. The new art-germ developed with the new civilization which surrounded it. Manufacture and commerce reappeared: the artisans and merchants formed into communities; the communities grew into towns, the towns into cities; in the city arose the cathedral; the Lombard or Byzantine mouldings and traceries of the cathedral gave birth to figure-sculpture; its mosaics gave birth to painting; every forward movement of the civilization unfolded as it were a new form or detail of the art, until, when mediaeval civilization was reaching its moment of consolidation, when the cathedrals of Lucca and Pisa stood completed, when Niccoto and Giovanni Pisani had sculptured their pulpits and sepulchres, painting, in the hands of, Cimabue and Duccio, of Giotto and of Guido da Siena, freed itself from the tradition of the mosaicists as sculpture had freed itself from the practice of the stone-masons, and stood forth an independent and organic art.

Thus painting was born of a new civilization, and grew by its own vital force; a thing of the Middle Ages, original and spontaneous. But contemporaneous with the mediaeval revival was the resuscitation of antiquity; in proportion as the new civilization developed, the old civilization was exhumed; real Latin began to be studied only when real Italian began to be written; Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio were at once the founders of modern literature and the exponents of the literature of antiquity; the strong young present was to profit by the experience of the past.

As it was with literature, so likewise was it with art. The most purely mediaeval sculpture, the sculpture which has, as it were, just detached itself from the capitals and porches of the cathedral, is the direct pupil of the antique; and the three great Gothic sculptors, Niccoto, Giovanni, and Andrea of Pisa, learn from fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture how to model the figure of the Redeemer and how to chisel the robe of the Virgin. This spontaneous mediaeval sculpture, aided by the antique, preceded by a full half-century the appearance of mediaeval painting; and it was from the study of the works of the Pisan sculptors, that Cimabue and Giotto learned to depart from the mummified monstrosities of the Miratic, Byzantine, and Roman style of Giunta and Berlinghieri. Thus, through the sculpture of the Pisans the painting of the school of Giotto received at second-hand the teachings of antiquity. Sculpture had created painting, painting now belonged to the painters. In the hands of Giotto it developed within a few years into an art which seemed almost mature, an art dealing victoriously with its materials, triumphantly solving its problems, executing as if by miracle all that was demanded of it. But Giottesque art appeared perfect merely because it was limited; it did all that was required of it, because that which was required was little; it was not asked to reproduce the real, nor to represent the beautiful, it was asked merely to suggest a character, a situation, a story.

The artistic development of a nation has its exact parallel in the artistic development of an individual. The child uses his pencil to tell a story, satisfied with balls and sticks as body, head, and legs, provided he and his friends can associate with them the ideas in their minds: the youth sets himself to copy what he sees, to reproduce forms, and effects, without any aim beyond the mere pleasure of copying; the mature artist strives to obtain forms and effects of which he approves, he seeks for beauty. In the life of Italian painting generations of men who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century are the mature artists; the men of the fifteenth century are the inexperienced youths; the Giottesques are the children—children Titanic and seraph-like, but children nevertheless, and, like all children, learning more perhaps in their few years than can the youth of the man learn in a lifetime.

Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to show a situation or express a story, and for this purpose the absolute realization of objects was unnecessary. Giottesque art is not incorrect art, it is generalized art; it is an art of mere outline. The Giottesques could draw with great accuracy the hand, the form of the fingers, the bend of the limb, they could give to perfection its whole gesture and movement, they could produce a correct and spirited outline, but within this correct outline marked off in dark paint there is but a vague, uniform mass of pale colour; the body of the hand is missing, and there remains only its ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight or warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between this spectre hand of the Giottesques, and the sinewy, muscular hand which can shake and crush of Masaccio and Signorelli, or the soft hand with throbbing pulse and warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,—this difference is typical of the difference between the art of the fourteenth century and the art of the fifteenth century; the first suggests, the second realizes; the one gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible bodies; the Giottesque cares for the figure only, inasmuch as it displays an action, he reduces it to a semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an idea; the man of the Renaissance cares for the figure, inasmuch as it is a living organism, he gives it substance and weight, he makes it stand out as an animate reality. But despite its early triumphs, the Giottesque style, by its inherent nature, forbade any progress; it reached its limits at once, and the followers of Giotto look almost as if they were his predecessors, for the simple reason that, being unable to advance, they were forced to retrograde. The limited amount of artistic realization required to present to the mind of the spectator a situation or an allegory had been obtained by Giotto himself, and bequeathed by him to his followers, who, finding it more than sufficient for their purposes, and having no incentive to further acquisition in the love of form and reality for their own sake, worked on with their master's materials, composing and recomposing, but adding nothing of their own. Giotto had observed Nature with passionate interest, because, although its representation was only a means to an end, it was a means which required to be mastered, and as such became in itself a sort of secondary aim; but the followers of Giotto merely utilized his observations of Nature, and in so doing gradually conventionalized and debased these second-hand observations. Giotto's forms are wilfully incomplete, because they aim at mere suggestion, but they are not conventional: they are diagrams, not symbols, and thence it is that Giotto seems nearer to the Renaissance than do his latest followers, not excepting even Orcagna. Painting, which had made the most prodigious strides from Giunta to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to Giotto, had got enclosed within a vicious circle, in which it moved for nearly a century neither backwards nor forwards: painters were satisfied with suggestion; and as long as they were satisfied, no progress was possible.

From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released by the intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre; their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself, perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the Florence baptistery; the generation of artists who arose at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and who opened the period of the Renaissance, were sculptors or pupils of sculptors. When we see these vigorous lovers of Nature, these heroic searchers after truth, suddenly pushing aside the decrepit Giottesque allegory-mongers, we ask ourselves in astonishment whence they have arisen, and how those broken-down artists of effete art could have begotten such a generation of giants. Whence do they come? Certainly not from the studios of the Giottesques; no, they issue out of the workshops of the stone-mason, of the goldsmith, of the worker in bronze, of the sculptor. Vasari has preserved the tradition that Masolino and Paolo Uccello were apprentices of Ghiberti; he has remarked that their greatest contemporary, Masaccio, "trod in the steps of Brunelleschi and of Donatello." Pollaiolo and Verrocchio we know to have been equally excellent as painters and as workers in bronze; sculpture, at once more naturalistic and more constantly under the influence of the antique, had for the second time laboured for painting. Itself a subordinate art, without real vitality, without deep roots in the civilization, sculpture was destined to remain the unsuccessful pupil of the antique, and the unsuccessful rival of painting; but sculpture had for its mission to prepare the road for painting and to prepare painting for antique influence, and the noblest work of Ghiberti and Donatello was Masaccio, as the most lasting glory to the Pisani had been Giotto.

With Masaccio began the study of Nature for its own sake, the desire of reproducing external objects without any regard to their significance as symbols or as parts of a story, the passionate wish to arrive at absolute realization. The merely suggestive outline art of the Giottesques had come to an end; the suggestion became a matter of indifference; the realization became a paramount interest; the story was forgotten in the telling, the religious thought was lost in the search for the artistic form. The Giottesques had used debased conventionalism to represent action with wonderful narrative and logical power; the artists of the early Renaissance became unskilful narrators and foolish allegorists almost in proportion as they became skilful draughtsmen and colourists; the Saints had become to Masaccio merely so many lay figures on to which to cast drapery; for Fra Filippo, the Madonna was a mere peasant model; for Filippino Lippi and for Ghirlandajo, a miracle meant merely an opportunity of congregating a number of admirable portrait figures in the dress of the day; the Baptism for Verrocchio had significance only as a study of muscular legs and arms; and the sacrifice of Noah had no importance for Uccello save as a grand opportunity for foreshortenings. In the hands of the Giottesques, interested in the subject and indifferent to the representation, painting had remained stationary for eighty years; for eighty years did it develop in the hands of the men of the fifteenth century, indifferent to the subject and passionately interested in the representation. The unity, the appearance of relative perfection of the art had disappeared with the limits within which the Giottesques had been satisfied to move; instead of the intelligible and solemn conventionalism of the Giottesques, we see only disorder, half-understood ideas and abortive attempts, confusion which reminds us of those enigmatic sheets on which Leonardo or Michel Angelo scrawled out their ideas, drawings within drawings, plans of buildings scratched over Madonna heads, single flowers upside down next to flayed arms, calculations, monsters, sonnets, a very chaos of thoughts and of shapes, in which the plan of the artist is inextricably lost, which mean everything and nothing, but out of whose unintelligible network of lines and curves have issued masterpieces, and which only the foolish or the would-be philosophical would exchange for some intelligible, hopelessly finished and finite illustration out of a Bible or a book of travels.

Anatomy, perspective, colour, drapery, effects of light, of water, of shadow, forms of trees and flowers, converging lines of architecture, all this at once absorbed and distracted the attention of the artists of the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, and calculated, another thought began to haunt them, another eager desire began to pursue them: by the side of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the bewildering, there rose up before them another divinity, another sphinx, mysterious in its very simplicity and serenity—the antique.

The exhumation of the antique had, as we have seen, been contemporaneous with the birth of painting; nay, the study of the remains of antique sculpture had, in contributing to form Niccoto Pisano, indirectly helped to form Giotto; the very painter of the "Triumph of Death" had inserted into his terrible fresco two-winged genii, upholding a scroll, copied without any alteration from some coarse Roman sarcophagus, in which they may have sustained the usual Dis Manibus Sacrum. There had been, on the part of both sculptors and painters, a constant study of the antique; but during the Giottesque period this study had been limited to technicalities, and had in no way affected the conception of art. The mediaeval artists, surrounded by physical deformities, and seeing sanctity in sickness and dirt, little accustomed to observe the human figure, were incapable, both as men and as artists, of at all entering into the spirit of antique art. They could not perceive the superior beauty of the antique; they could recognize only its superior science and its superior handicraft, and these they studied to obtain.

Giovanni Pisano, sculpturing the unfleshed, carved carcases of the devils who leer, writhe, crunch, and tear on the outside of Orvieto Cathedral, and the Giottesques painting those terrible green, macerated Christs, hanging livid and broken from the cross, which abound in Tuscany and Umbria, the artists who produced these loathsome and lugubrious works were indubitably students of the antique; but they had learned from it not a love for beautiful form and noble drapery, but merely the general shape of the limbs and the general fall of the garments; the anatomical science and technical processes of antiquity were being used to produce the most intensely un-antique, the most intensely mediaeval works. Thus matters stood in the time of Giotto. His followers, who studied only arrangement, probably consulted the antique as little as they consulted Nature; but the contemporary sculptors were brought by the very constitution of their art into close contact both with Nature and with the antique; they studied both with determination, and handed over the results of their labours to the sculptor-taught painters of the fifteenth century.

Here, then, were the two great factors in the art of the Renaissance—the study of Nature, and the study of the antique; both understood slowly, imperfectly; the one counteracting the effect of the other; the study of Nature now scaring away all antique influence; the study of the antique now distorting all imitation of Nature; rival forces confusing the artist and marring the work, until, when each could receive its due, the one corrected the other, and they combined, producing by this marriage of the living reality with the dead but immortal beauty, the great art of Michel Angelo, of Raphael, and of Titian: double like its origin, antique and modern, real and ideal.

The study of the antique is thus placed opposite to the study of Nature, the comprehension of the works of antiquity is the momentary antagonist of the comprehension of Nature. And this may seem strange, when we consider that antique art was itself due to perfect comprehension of Nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The study of Nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the study of effects which had remained unnoticed by antiquity; and the study of the statue, colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, interfered with, and was interfered with by, the study of colour, of light and shade, of perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to learn from Nature. Nor was this all; the influence of the civilization of the Renaissance, of a civilization directly issued from the Middle Ages, was entirely at variance with the influence of antique civilization through the medium of ancient art; the Middle Ages and antiquity, Christianity and Paganism, were even more opposed to each other than could be the statue and the easel picture, the fresco and the bas-relief.

First, then, we have the hostility between painting and sculpture, between the modus operandi of the modern and the modus operandi of the ancient art. Antique art is in the first place purely linear art, colourless, tintless, without light and shade; next, it is essentially the art of the isolated figure, without background, grouping, or perspective. As linear art it could directly affect only that branch of painting which was itself linear, and as art of the isolated figure it was ever being contradicted by the constantly developing arts of perspective and landscape. The antique never directly influenced the Venetians, not from reasons of geography and culture, but from the fact that Venetian painting, founded from the earliest times upon a system of colour, could not be affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system of modelled, colourless forms; the men who saw form only through the medium of colour could not learn much from purely linear form; hence it is that even after a certain amount of antique imitation had passed into Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna, the Venetian painters display comparatively little antique influence. In Bellini, Carpaccio, Cima, and other early masters, the features, forms, and dress are mainly modern and Venetian; and Giorgione, Titian, and even the eclectic Tintoret were more interested in the bright lights of a steel breastplate than in the shape of a limb, and preferred in their hearts a shot brocade of the sixteenth century to the finest drapery modelled by an ancient.

The antique influence was naturally strongest among the Tuscan schools; because the Tuscan schools were essentially schools of drawing, and the draughtsman only recognized in antique sculpture the highest perfection of that linear form which was his own domain. The antique not only appealed most to the linear schools, but even in them it could strongly influence only the purely linear part; it is strong in the drawings and weak in the paintings. As long as the artists had only the pencil or pen, they could reproduce much of the linear perfection of the antique; they were, so to speak, alone with it; but as soon as they brought in colour, perspective, and scenery, the linear perfection was lost in attempts at something new; the antique was put to flight by the modern. Botticelli's crayon study for his Venus is almost antique, his tempera picture of Venus, with the pale blue scaly sea, the laurel grove, the flower-embroidered garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively mediaeval; Pinturricchio's sketch of fauns and satyrs contrasts strangely with his frescos in the library of Silena; Mantegna himself, supernaturally antique in his engravings, becomes almost trivial and modern in his oil paintings. Do what they might, draw from the antique, calculate its proportions, the artists of the Renaissance found themselves baffled as soon as they attempted to apply the result of their linear studies to coloured pictures; as soon as they tried to make the antique unite with the modern, one of the two elements was sure to succumb. In Botticelli, draughtsman and student though he was, the modern, the mediaeval, that part of the art which had arisen in the Middle Ages, invariably had the upper hand; his Venus has, despite her forms studied from the antique and her gesture imitated from some earlier discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, the woe-begone prudery of a Madonna or of an abbess; she shivers physically and morally in her unaccustomed nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes skipping up from beneath the laurel copse, does well to prepare her a mantle, for in the paled tempera colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea, this mediaeval Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is no pleasing sight. In the Allegory of Spring in the Academy of Florence, we again have the antique; goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the gentle Sandro Botticelli has assuredly studied from some old statue of Agrippina or Faustina; but what strange livid tints are there beneath those draperies, what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what a green, ghostlike light illumines the garden of Venus! Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines, incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist?

In Sandro Botticelli the teachings of the statue are forgotten or distorted when the artist takes up his palette and brushes; in his far greater contemporary, Andrea Mantegna, the ever-present antique chills and arrests the vitality of the modern. Mantegna, the pupil of the ancient marbles of Squarcione's workshop even more than the pupil of Donatello, studies for his paintings not from Nature, but from sculpture; his figures are seen in strange projection and foreshortening, like figures in a high relief seen from below; despite his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn out of the background; despite the rich colours which he displays in his Veronese altar-piece, they look like painted marbles, with their hard clots of stone-like hair and beard, with their vacant glance and their wonderful draperies, clinging and weighty like the wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They are beautiful petrifactions, or vivified statues; Mantegna's masterpiece, the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite, pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton, sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his finned horse, preparing to strike his adversary with a bunch of fish which he brandishes above him; on him is rushing, careering on an osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury stretching every tendon, his long clawed feet striking into the flanks of his steed, his sharp, reed-crowned head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his opponent, and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run down his enemy as a ship runs down another; and further off a young Triton, with clotted hair and heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble agony of the dying Alexander; enigmatic figures, grand and grotesque, lean, haggard, vehement, and yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity, unaccountably antique. The other print, called the Bacchanal, has no background: half-a-dozen male figures stand separate and naked as in a bas-relief. Some are leaning against a vine-wreathed tub; a satyr, with acanthus-leaves growing wondrously out of him, half man, half plant, is emptying a cup; a heavy Silenus is prone upon the ground; a faun, seated upon the vat, is supporting in his arms a beautiful sinking youth; another youth, grand, muscular and grave as a statue, stands on the further side. Is this really a bacchanal? Yes, for there is the paunchy Silenus, there are the fauns, there the vat and vine-wreaths and drinking-horns. And yet it cannot be a bacchanal. Compare with it one of Rubens's orgies, where the overgrown, rubicund men and women and fauns tumble about in tumultuous, riotous intoxication: that is a bacchanal; they have been drinking, those magnificent brutes, there is wine firing their blood and weighing down their heads. But here all is different, in this so-called Bacchanal of Mantegna. This heavy Silenus is supine like a mass of marble; these fauns are shy and mute; these youths are grave and sombre; there is no wine in the cups, there are no lees in the vat, there is no life in these magnificent colossal forms; there is no blood in their grandly bent lips, no light in their wide-opened eyes; it is not the drowsiness of intoxication which is weighing down the youth sustained by the faun; it is no grape-juice, which gives that strange, vague glance. No; they have drunk, but not of any mortal drink; the grapes are grown in Persephone's garden, the vat contains no fruits that have ripened beneath our sun. These strange, mute, solemn revellers have drunk of Lethe, and they are growing cold with the cold of death and of marble; they are the ghosts of the dead ones of antiquity, revisiting the artist of the Renaissance, who paints them, thinking he is painting life, while that which he paints is in reality death.

This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the works of both Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly technical; the antique is frustrated in Botticelli, not so much by the Christian, the mediaeval, the modern mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of the new art which disconcert the methods and aims of the old art; and that which arrests Mantegna in his development as a painter is not the spirit of paganism deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of sculpture hampering painting. But this technical contest between two arts, the one not yet fully developed, the other not yet fully understood, is as nothing compared with the contest between the two civilizations, the antique and the modern; between the habits and tendencies of the contemporaries of the artists of the Renaissance and of the artists themselves, and the habits and tendencies of the antique artists and their contemporaries. We are apt to think of the Renaissance as of a period closely resembling antiquity, misled by the inevitable similarity between southern and democratic countries of whatever age; misled still less pardonably by the Ciceronian pedantries and pseudo-antique obscurities of a few humanists, and by the pseudo-Corinthian arabesques and capitals of a few learned architects. But all this was mere archaeological finery borrowed by a civilization in itself entirely unlike that of ancient Greece.

The Renaissance, let us remember, was merely the flowering time of that great mediaeval movement which had germinated early in the twelfth century; it was merely a more advanced stage of the civilization which had produced Dante and Giotto, of the civilization which was destined to produce Luther and Rabelais. The fifteenth century was merely the continuation of the fourteenth century, as the fourteenth had been of the thirteenth; there had been growth and improvement; development of the more modern, diminishing of the more mediaeval elements; but, despite growth and the changes due to growth, the Renaissance was part and parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, thought, aspirations, and habits were mediaeval, opposed to the open-air life, the physical training, and the materialistic religion of antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio and of Signorelli, nay, even of Raphael, were very different from those of Phidias or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and hourly impressions given by the Renaissance to its artists. Large towns, in which thousands of human beings were crowded together, in narrow, gloomy streets, with but a strip of blue visible between the projecting roofs; and in these cities an incessant commercial activity, with no relief save festivals at the churches, brawls at the taverns, and carnival buffooneries. Men and women pale and meagre for want of air, and light, and movement; undeveloped, untrained bodies, warped by constant work at the loom or at the desk, at best with the lumpish freedom of the soldier and the vulgar nimbleness of the 'prentice. And these men and women dressed in the dress of the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous in form; citizens in lumpish robes and long-tailed caps; ladies in stiff and foldless brocade hoops and stomachers; artisans in striped and close-adhering hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin; soldiers in lumbering armour-plates, ill-fitted over ill-fitting leather, a shapeless shell of iron, bulging out and angular, in which the body was buried as successfully as in the robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and women of the Renaissance in the works of all its painters; heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Fillipino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; and mediaeval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's Building of Babel.

These are the prosperous townsfolk, among whom the Renaissance artist is but too glad to seek for models; but besides these there are lamentable sights, mediaeval beyond words, at every street corner—dwarfs and cripples, maimed and diseased beggars of all degrees of loathsomeness, lepers and epileptics, and infinite numbers of monks, brown, grey and black, in sack-shaped frocks and pointed hoods, with shaven crown and cropped beard, emaciated with penance or bloated with gluttony. And all this the painter sees, daily, hourly; it is his standard of humanity, and as such finds its way into every picture. It is the living; but opposite it arises the dead. Let us turn aside from the crowd of the mediaeval city, and look at what the workmen have just laid bare, or what the merchant has just brought from Rome or from Greece. Look at this: it is corroded by oxides, battered by ill-usage, stained with earth: it is not a group, not even a whole statue, it has neither head nor arms remaining; it is a mere broken fragment of antique sculpture,—a naked body with a fold or two of drapery; it is not by Phidias nor by Praxiteles, it may not even be Greek; it may be some cheap copy, made for a garden or a bath, in the days of Hadrian. But to the artist of the fifteenth century it is the revelation of a whole world, a world in itself. We can scarcely realize all this; but let us look and reflect, and even we may feel as must have felt the man of the Renaissance in the presence of that mutilated, stained, battered torso. He sees in that broken stump a grandeur of outline, a magnificence of osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and sinew, a smooth, firm covering of flesh, such as he would vainly seek in any of his living models; he sees a delicate and infinite variety of indentures, of projections, of creases following the bend of every limb; he sees, where the surface still exists intact, an elasticity of skin, a buoyancy of hidden life such as all the colours of his palette are unable to imitate; and in this piece of drapery, negligently gathered over the hips or robed upon the arm, he sees a magnificent alternation of large folds and small creases, of straight lines, and broken lines, and curves. He sees all this; but he sees more: the broken torso is, as we have said, not merely a world in itself, but the revelation of a world.

It is the revelation of antique civilization, of the palaestra and the stadium, of the sanctification of the body, of the apotheosis of man, of the religion of life and nature and joy; revealed to the man of the Middle Ages, who has hitherto seen in the untrained, diseased, despised body but a deformed piece of baseness, which his priests tell him belongs to the worms and to Satan; who has been taught that the monk living in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn out with fastings and bleeding with flagellation, is the nearest approach to divinity; who has seen Divinity itself, pale, emaciated, joyless, hanging bleeding from the cross; and who is for ever reminded that the kingdom of this Divinity is not of this world.

What passes in the mind of that artist? What surprise, what dawning doubts, what sickening fears, what longings and what remorse are not the fruit of this sight of antiquity? Is he to yield or to resist? Is he to forget the saints and Christ and give himself over to Satan and to antiquity? Only one man boldly said Yes. Mantegna abjured his faith, abjured the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time, and in so doing cast away from him the living art and became the lover, the worshipper of shadows. And only one man turned completely aside from the antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da Fiesoli. And with the antique, Fra Angelico rejected all the other artistic influences and aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of Orcagna, but of Masaccio, of Uccello, of Poliaiolo and Donatitis. For the mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his days; dreaded to leave the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced to a mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim; dreaded to soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour, and character; unsubstantial and unruffled, dreaming feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of inanity; of divine dolls with pallid flaxen locks, floating between heaven and earth, playing upon lute and viol and psaltery; raised to faint visions of angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless, meaningless, across the flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints seated, arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the dearly-purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in an aesthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same bloodless virgins; happy in smoothing the unmixed, unshaded tints of the sky, and earth, and dresses; laying on the gold of the fretted skies, and of the iridescent wings, embroidering robes, instruments of music, haloes, flowers, with threads of gold.... Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing art to something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery of pious nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery of pious monks; a something too delicately gorgeous, too deliciously insipid for human wear or human food; no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either in its study of the truly existing, or in its study of antique beauty.

Mantegna, the learned, the archaeological, the pagan, who renounces his times and his faith; and Angelico, the monk, the saint, who shuts and bolts his monastery doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the antique, the two extremes, are both exceptions. The innumerable artists of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the antique and the modern, to unite the pagan and the Christian—some, like Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere form, encrusting marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal house, bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying baskets and noble Stroggi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded over their gold brocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and child-like pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched collars, among the pines and porticos, the sprawling children, barking dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of his Scripture histories; yet others using the antique as mere pageant shows, allegorical mummeries destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis of Mantua, together with hurdle races of Jews, hags, and riderless donkeys.

Little by little the antique amalgamates with the modern; the art born of the Middle Ages absorbs the art born of paganism; but how slowly, and with what fantastic and ludicrous results at first; as when the anatomical sculptor Pollaiolo gives scenes of naked Roman prize-fighters as martyrdoms of St. Sebastian; or when the pious Perugino (pious at least with his brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic, beardless archangels as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath their wondrously ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at Perugia; when he masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of all, when he attires in scantiest of clinging antique drapery his mild and pensive Madonnas, and, with daintily-pointed toes, places them to throne bashfully on allegorical chariots as Venus or Diana.

Long is the period of amalgamation, and little are the results throughout that long early Renaissance. Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Melozzo, Ghirlandajo, Filippino, Botticelli, Verrocchio, have none of them shown us the perfect fusion of the two elements whose union is to give us Michel Angelo, Raphael, and all the great perfect artists of the early sixteenth century; the two elements are for ever ill-combined and hostile to each other; the modern vulgarizes the antique, the antique paralyzes the modern. And meanwhile the fifteenth century, the century of study, of conflict, and of confusion, is rapidly drawing to a close; eight or ten more years, and it will be gone. Is the new century to find the antique still dead and the modern still mediaeval?

The antique and the modern had met for the first time and as irreconcileable enemies in the cloisters of Pisa; and the modern had triumphed in the great mediaeval fresco of the Triumph of Death. By a strange coincidence, by a sublime jest of accident, the antique and the modern were destined to meet again, and this time indissolubly united, in a painting representing the Resurrection. Yes, Signorelli's fresco in Orvieto Cathedral is indeed a resurrection, the resurrection of human beauty after the long death-slumber of the Middle Ages. And the artist would seem to have been dimly conscious of the great allegory he was painting. Here and there are strewn skulls; skeletons stand leering by, as if in remembrance of the ghastly past, and as a token of former death; but magnificent youths are breaking through the crust of the earth, emerging, taking shape and flesh; arising, strong and proud, ready to go forth at the bidding of the Titanic angels who announce from on high with trumpet sound and waving banners that the death of the world has come to an end, and that humanity has arisen once more in the youth and beauty of antiquity.

II.

Signorelli's fresceos at Orvieto, at once the latest works of the fifteenth century, and the latest works of an old man nurtured in the traditions of Benozzo Gozzoli and of Piero della Francesca, mark the beginning of the maturity and perfection of Italian art. From them Michel Angelo learns what he could not be taught even by his master Ghirlandajo, the grand and cold realist; he learns, and what he has learned at Orvieto he teaches with doubled force in Rome; and the ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, the superb and heroic nudities, the majestic draperies, the reappearance in the modern art of painting of the spirit and hand of Phidias, give a new impulse and hasten on perfection. When the doors of the chapel are at length opened, Raphael forgets Perugino; Fra Bartolomeo forgets Botticelli; Sodoma forgets Leonardo; the narrower hesitating styles of the fifteenth century are abandoned, as the great example is disseminated throughout Italy; and even the tumult of angels in glory which the Lombard Correggio is to paint in far-off Parma, and the daringly simple Bacchus and Ariadne with which Tintoret will decorate the Ducal palace more than fifty years later, all that is great and bold, all that is a re-incarnation of the spirit of antiquity, all that marks the culmination of Renaissance art, seems due to the impulse of Michel Angelo, and, through him, to the example of Signorelli. From the celestial horseman and bounding avenging angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with delicate limbs and exquisite head, rich with tendril-like locks against the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated, with the head and drapery of a Niobe, on the sack of flour in the Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half concealing her body of golden white, who leans against the sculptured fountain in Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love," with the greenish blue sky and hazy light of evening behind her; from the most extreme examples of the most extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the most intense examples of the remotest schools of Tuscany and Umbria, throughout the art of the early sixteenth century, of those thirty years which were the years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but always distinct, the union of the living art born of the Middle Ages with the dead art left by antiquity, a union producing life and perfection, the great art of the Renaissance.