generally known, had he not been overshadowed by his mighty relative. M. Frederic Cuvier was born at Montbéliard, in 1773, and, as we have before mentioned, was established in Paris in 1795, at the house of his brother, where his wife died in giving birth to a son. In 1804, he was appointed keeper of the menagerie belonging to the Jardin des Plantes; in 1810 he became Inspector of the Academy of Paris. The cross of the Legion of Honour was given to him in 1818; he was elected member of the Academy of Sciences in 1826, and in 1831 was made Inspector General of the Univers' y; became one of the established contributors to the Journal des Savans, and received the title of Chevalier. In 1835 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London, and in 1837 was called to fill the chair of Professor of Physiology to the Museum of Natural History. His works all relate to zoology and physiology, to the advancement of which he much contributed; the greater number consist of memoirs scattered through the Annales du Muséum, the Dictionnaire des Sciences Naturelles, &c. &c., among which the most remarkable are, that article in the Dictionnaire headed "Instinct," "New Observations concerning Seals, Dogs, &c.," and many other most valuable remarks on animal economy. In conjunction with M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire, he commenced a large work entitled "Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères," which now amounts to seventy numbers, containing 420 plates, and forms the most extensive publication of the kind since the time of Buffon. His observations on the development and structure of feathers are quite new, and his reports to the Institute strongly evince the penetration, research, and impartiality of the author. On his return from one of his journies as Inspector General, he was seized with paralysis at Strasbourg, where, however, he found himself in the midst of friends, especially Dr. Duvernoy, Every effort that art could make was exerted in his behalf, but the malady was too rapid, and too sure, to be capable even of amelioration. His son, who was sent for immediately, arrived too late to see him alive. As a savant, his loss is great; as a promoter of education, the absence of his sound, liberal, yet moderate, views will be deeply felt; but as a father and a friend, there is no possibility of replacing him the very animals of the menagerie who were the objects of his daily cares, will miss his kindness. We understand that M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire has again been suffered to annex this office to his functions, from which it had been separated, and that M. Flourens is appointed to the vacant chair of Comparative Physiology. ART. IV. Dictionary of the Artists of Antiquity, Architects, Carvers, Engravers, Modellers, Painters, Sculptors, Statuaries, and Workers in Bronze, Gold, Ivory, and Silver: with three Chronological Tables. By Julius Sillig. Translated by the Rev. H. W. Williams. To which are added C. Plinii Secundi Naturalis Historiæ Libri xxxiv.—xxxvi. c. 8-5. With four Indexes and a Preface. By E. H. Barker, Esq. London: 1838. THE obscurity that involves the earliest records of Greece notwithstanding all the labours of learning and affection bestowed upon the subject by scholars of every age and nation, must upon every unprejudiced mind necessarily produce the conviction that her origin, from whatever quarter, was altogether unknown to her inhabitants at the date of legitimate history; and that the various sources to which these were contented to refer it being in themselves undefined, can remove the difficulty but a single step, and render further efforts through the usual channels utterly hopeless; while it further enforces the necessity of examining carefully all that remains to us any where, that might by possibility assist to point out the sources in question. With the doubt thus resting upon the national existence it cannot of course create any surprise that those seeds of art which, all undeveloped, were sleeping and fostered in the very bosom of that chaos should be altogether concealed from our eyes and that long after these must have been called forth into substantive existence their growth and progress are so utterly undiscoverable, that the very personality of the earliest celebrated artist is a matter of doubt, if not positive denial, to the learned of our days. It is probably too great a refinement in scepticism to question the actuality of Dædalus from the generic character of his name, since his acts and improvements are most distinctly specified, as by Pausanias and Diodorus Siculus: and even granting that the works referred to as extant were the productions of later artists, it is obvious, we submit, that the bare fact of their attribution to Dædalus the Athenian, is not only insufficient to induce a doubt of his existence, but goes far, on the contrary, to confirm it; since his identity was thereby admitted, and his celebrity established, in an age not so remote from his own times as that which has questioned both. The supplementary doubts of German writers, as to the improvements he effected in art, we shall pass over with the single remark that the previous and subsequent state of the arts, as affirmed by classic authorities, are amply borne out by facts unquestionable at this hour of dis covery; and we therefore hold to the first point; to wit, the name, generally considered. We have only to look, in truth, to the practice of every ancient nation to discover the fallacy of the argument raised on this ground. In all of them we find that the office or avocation takes its designation from the subject to which it refers, the attribute it includes, or the talent displayed. The origin of terms could not be other than this: and though such appellative would be only a distinctive epithet, and not the proper name of the individual, yet we everywhere find instances of the latter being merged in the former, where this became of importance. Thus, though reducible to components, we cannot have a hesitation in admitting that though known as Phre, the sovereign, generally, each King of Egypt had a proper name of his own; that there was one, and more than one Persian Xerxes (Shirashe, the Glorious); that there was a Patriarch Abraham, though his name means but the Father of the Faithful; that Zoroaster lived, although thus designated as the Explorer of the Heavens; that Dalilab, become the Arabic for a salesman, once betrayed Samson; and Homer, though properly signifying collector, must have referred to somebody. Among the Turks and Orientals an attributive epithet subjoined, as Kara Mustapha, Timur Leng, the Black, or the Lame, is never considered to annihilate the person that bears it; and Boabdil existed, though oftener called El Chico by the Moors. Nay, in our own land the Browns and Greens are not merely resolvable into vegetable matter or refractions of light; tangibilities under the respectable cognomen of Smith do occasionally make their appearance at our police-offices if the newspapers are to be believed, instead of becoming Cyclopean Mythoi, however desirable this might be at such times; and our loaded prisons testify that even John Doe and Richard Roe are not pure metaphysics, though they especially deal with those abstractions of personality who, in mysterious language, "do run up and down" and are nowhere forthcoming when called upon. The Laws upon Debt are public documents, and fortunately still existing, to satisfy the most incredulous on this head. It is clear, and not from direct testimony alone, but also, and most conclusively, from indirect testimony also, that pictures formed the first means of ocular communication; but this, as shown in our previous Number (XLII. pp. 349-352), to only a limited extent: and that Statuary followed Painting is the sole conclusion that remains to us from the little we can learn of the early past. Though Tubal-Cain is noticed as a cunning artificer in brass, not the slightest indication is given of his having adapted his labours to the imitation of forms. The pillars set up by Noah for the Flood, the first monuments that occur to us, are equally destitute of evidence in this matter; unless from the silence of the historian we conclude, as alone we are justified in concluding, that their bare existence was also the sole commemoration of the event, and that they were devoid of any specific signs, for posterity. The Arabs, who affirm the existence of at least one ante-diluvian alphabet, can show no evidence of this assertion. We may therefore reject it, for it is but reasonable to conclude that had Noah been acquainted with it, his posterity would not have failed to preserve the original language after Babel. In the absence of characters it is therefore but fair to infer that pictures formed the first representative of history, as is clear indeed from the cases cited by Cory and others; from the authorities taken from columns by Thoth; from the tale of Menes and the Hippopotamus; and of the Boar of Adonis or Tammus, worshipped also in the "Chambers of Imagery" by the daughters of Israel, "Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch Ezekiel saw, when, by the vision led, His eye surveyed the dark idolatries Of alienated Judah." And we may observe by the way that the word, happily rendered Imagery in our translation, is not to be taken as Images but, in the pure sense, representations on walls, &c., like those of, Egyptian Necrography, from which they were doubtless copied as the "creeping things," &c. would additionally imply. We may quote on this subject also from the positive and direct testimony of Tacitus, who says: "Prima per figuras animalium Egyptii sensus mentis effingebant, et antiquissima monumenta memoriæ humanæ saxis cernuntur."-"At first the Egyptians depicted mental conceptions by the figures of animals, and the most ancient monuments of human memory are found on stones." Ann. xi. 14. And Lucan seems in his Pharsalia to say the same of the Phoenicians; that is, if we are to understand "figuris" in the same sense as the "figuras" of Tacitus above quoted. This however is not quite certain. The tablets of Bellerophon are also a doubtful evidence. The same system of picturing thought may be found in the symbolical forms of the Brahmin deities, with arms for powers, an elephant's trunk for wisdom, &c. The earliest and, so far as we can judge, the only valid accounts that have come down to us of the origin of sculpture, are two; and singularly enough, these are not only strongly corroborative of each other as to the fact itself, but also of the individual, and some slight circumstances respecting him. The accounts we refer to are, the Hebrew and the Persian. We read in Genesis that Thura, or Terah, called Tharah by St. Luke, was the first who invented images; and that they quickly became objects of worship is presumable from the fact of Rachael stealing the gods of Laban. We find in the Persian accounts that afforded the basis of the Shah-Nameh of Ferdousi, so far as the former are preserved to us, that in the reign of Thamuras a great mortality occurring (the Orientals always find a cause for everything), images, resembling the deceased, were invented. There exists, and this makes the point more remarkable, some confusion as to the number of idols, whether one or many; and tradition expressly refers to an image or picture of the King himself, which, from the following versification of that ancient and wide-spread tradition, clearly combines the attributes of conquest, the conquered nation, and fire. "Where murkiest mists involve afar With charmed cuirass and sword of flame; Where sank the last Preadamite. The Persian sovereign then was a great conqueror, a fiery warrior, (and as such designated,) who pushed his conquests over the Demons or Deeves, vulgarly called the Brahmin race, into Mazanderan on one side, and towards a trans-marine race, represented by men with fishes' heads, in another. This must, therefore, have been across Asia-Minor, or Mesopotamia. Terah, it will be recollected, went from Ur of the Chaldeas to Charan; the Arabs, who recognize his connection with Fire, call him Dhura, or Adhur,, pronouncing the 3 like dh. * Simurgh, the wonderful bird. + Sipar, the magic shield. |