difficulties of the Egyptian text. Canon Cook's translation of the long inscription of Pianchi is quite admirable both for its elegance and for its accuracy. Much as my own views differ from some which the learned Canon has greatly at heart in his commentary on the Bible, I am bound to say that his illustrations of the sacred text from Egyptian sources are thoroughly scholarlike, and as different as possible from what we have been accustomed to, either on the conservative or on the destructive side of the question.* The travels in Palestine and Syria of a contemporary of the great Rameses, and therefore (according to the most competent judges) anterior to the Exodus of the Israelites, must necessarily be of the utmost interest. The narrative, however, is not told by the hero of it; it is, on the contrary, addressed to him. Had the journey with all its adventures really taken place? or is it the writer's intention to sketch a possible journey (just as we might a tour in Switzerland or Italy), strictly adhering to topographical facts and couleur locale, but drawing upon his imagination for the adventures of his hero? The question is by no means easy of solution. A great deal depends upon one of those problems of Egyptian grammar to which a very insuf. ficient degree of attention has yet been paid. I am not alluding to the use of the negative particles which occur frequently in this narrative. M. Chabas is most unquestionably right in translating them in an interrogative sense. The whole context requires this sense, and it is incredible that another should have been proposed. My difficulty is this. On reading M. Chabas's translation I constantly find verbs in the past tense, "Didst thou not then go?" "Hast thou not seen ? "Hast thou not trampled? "Hast thou not penetrated?" "Wentest thou not?" "Didst thou not meet? Let me tell all that happened to thee at the end of thy road?" If the corresponding Egyptian expressions are equally definite in the use of a past tense, then indeed there can be no doubt that the writer meant to describe a journey which had taken place. But in every one of these instances, and others of the same kind, the Egyptian verb may quite as correctly be translated by a present tense, and if the present tense be substituted for the past, the whole context will be consistent with the hypothesis that the writer's intention is simply, "I have made for thee the portrait of the Mohar, I have travelled for thee through foreign provinces," as he says at the end of his work, in M. Chabas's version. It is not right, however, to confine the evidence to this portion of the papyrus, and it is much to be regretted that all the earlier portions of it which have been translated by M. Chabas have been omitted. They are indispensable as aids to the interpretation of the later sections, and some of them are highly interesting for their own sake. I may perhaps here mention one illustration which has escaped Canon Cook at Judges xx. 2, and 1 Sam. xiv. 38. It has not yet, I think, been noticed by anyone. The use of the word "corner" for chieftain is certainly a reminiscence of the Egyptian kenbet, and is particularly striking in Isaiah xix. 13. Mr. Goodwin has translated one of those sublime hymns in which the dominant note is decidedly monotheistic. It is in honour of the Creator and sustainer of all existences, the father of the fathers of all the gods, the one god without a peer, whose name is hidden from his creatures. He is the Lord of eternity, and the everlasting Maker, causing all things which are to exist, the Lord of wisdom and truth. He is at once the Lord of terror most awful and the Lord of mercy most loving. He it is who raises the heavens and fixes the earth, who makes grass for the cattle and fruitful trees for men, who makes the birds to fill the air, and gives breath to those in the egg, feeding the bird that flies, giving food to the bird that perches, to the creeping thing and the flying thing equally. He provides food for the rats in their holes. If he consumes his enemies with flame and subdues the wicked with his eye, he lies awake whilst all men sleep, seeking out the good of his creatures; he is gentle of heart when one cries to him, he listens to the poor who is in distress, and delivers the timid man from the violent. The conception of a self-existent Creator of all things is extremely ancient in Egypt, but the form in which that conception is expressed, as in the beautiful hymn of which I am speaking, is met more frequently in productions of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. The "Lamentations of Iris and Nephthys," translated by M. de Horrack, are not less interesting in their way. This composition appears to have had a liturgical use. It was to be recited on behalf of the dead. The rubric at the end directs that during the recital two handsome women should sit on the ground with the names of Iris and Nephthys inscribed upon their shoulders, crystal vases full of water in their right hands, and loaves of bread made in Memphis in their left hands. * appears to The most difficult of the Egyptian texts translated in this volume is that entitled "The Instructions of King Amenemhat I. to his son Usertesen I." (or rather "Usertsen,' i.e. "their wealth' "power"). or This and the other documents, contained with it in the Second Sallier Papyrus are the most difficult in the whole range of the Egyptian literature now extant. The Prisse papyrus perhaps contains a larger number of words as yet unintelligible to us, but the grammatical structure of the sentences is easy enough. The text of the Sallier papyrus defies all grammatical rule. It me to be hopelessly corrupt and in many parts impossible of translation. In saying this, I am pronouncing no opinion against the truthfulness of the version of M. Maspero, who has had the use of the unpublished Millingen papyrus. This, he says, "is correct enough, and when entire contained the whole of the work; it is unfortunately mutilated at the end, and fails exactly where it is most wanted." The uninitiated must therefore not be scandalised if they accidentally come across a version by Dr. Duemichen widely differing from that of M. Maspero. The two versions are really made from different texts. * A certain number of Egyptian proper names consist of nouns such as life, strength, &c., accompapanied by my, his, her, or their. These pronouns refer, I believe, to the parents of the person. But let us hope that so highly valuable, nay, so indispensable, a text as that of the Millingen papyrus may not be allowed much longer to remain unpublished. M. Paul Pierret contributes the translation of a short text which is, perhaps, not quite correctly described as "the Egyptian account of a scene of investiture with the Chain of honour." The investiture, as M. Pierret himself observes, is not mentioned in the text, and it is only one of the scenes represented on the tablet. The volume finishes with two novels, the first being the "Tale of the Brothers," translated by myself; the second the "Tale of the Doomed Prince," unfortunately a mere fragment, translated by Mr. Goodwin. P. LE P. RENOUF. SCIENCE NOTES. BOTANY. It THE tree-aloes of South Africa rank with the most remarkable of vegetable forms, and until quite recently were almost unknown. Professor Dyer collected all information relating to them he could obtain, and published it in the Gardener's Chronicle for May 2, 1874. This article is illustrated. Fresh material having come to hand, he was able to correct an important error of his in the article cited, and in Nature, December 3, 1874, he gives a summary of the present position of our knowledge of these singular trees. contains some points of interest worth reproducing. The species of Aloe are probably only really indigenous in south and east Africa, though A. region and elsewhere, but only as a cultivated vulgaris is widely spread in the Mediterranean plant, or an escape from cultivation. A. indica of Royle is doubtless a variety of the preceding, as is also probably A. littoralis of Koenig, found at Cape Comorin, the difference in character being due to altered conditions of situation. In some rocky districts the tree-aloes form the dominating feature of the landscape, giving it a very peculiar appearance. The eastern species occasionally attains a height of 60 feet. There are two species of tree-aloe in South Africa-one endemic on the west coast, and the other confined to the east. That of the west, A. dichotoma, Linn., extends from Walvisch Bay to Clan william. It is well described in Paterson's Travels in Africa (1789), but otherwise very little known. The present Governor of the Cape, Sir Henry plants for Kew, and two have now arrived in this Barkly, has made great exertions to procure country, the largest being eight feet in height, but there is some doubt whether they will eventually survive the voyage. The eastern species, A. Barberae, Dyer, was named in honour of Mrs. Barber, who first sent cuttings of it to this country. A. dichotoma attains a height of thirty Dyer, turns out to be the same species as 4. feet, with a girth of about twelve feet. A. Bainesi, Barberae, the character of scattered or clustered leaves having broken down in this instance. The specimen named Barberae had its leaves originally arranged in rosettes at the ends of the branches, but as it grew they became distant and scattered. There are still some slight discrepancies to clear up with regard to the flowers. THE Algo-lichen theory shadowed forth by De Bary (Handbuch der Physiologischen Botanik, p. 29), and developed by Schwendener ("Ueber die wahre Natur der Flechten," in the Verhandlungen der Schweizer'schen Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Rheinfelden, 1867, pp. 88-90), and in numerous subsequent articles published in various periodicals, is gaining supporters. Several other investigators, and notably Bornet (Annales des Sciences Naturelles, 5 série, t. xvii. p. 45, and t. xix. p. 314), whose first article is illustrated by a series of (including Bentham and Hooker) as a tribe of the Myrtaceae; Mr. Miers, however, prefers to follow Richard and Lindley in retaining them as a distinct order, characterised by the remarkable regard-"androphorum" or ring that bears the stamens, which sometimes becomes petaloid; the ovary almost always inferior, with from two to six cells, having a small number of ovules either suspended by funicles from the axis, or basilar, erect, and sessile; and the fruit of the nature of a pyxidium with opercular dehiscence. The order is divided into twelve genera, among which are distributed nearly two hundred species; several of the genera and a large number of the species being now described for the first time. The paper is illustrated by thirty-three magnificent plates, containing analyses of the important features in the characters of each genus, and drawings of the fruit of many of the more interesting species. BIOLOGY. eleven beautifully executed plates, have taken up DR. HECTOR, the Hon. Mr. Fox, and other observers, have recently made some communications to the Philosophical Society of New Zealand, from which it appears that the colony is threatened with a very formidable and disastrous plague in the form of ergot in rye grass. It does not actually kill either the sheep or cattle, but it seriously affects their fertility. They suffer in autumn only, when they reel about helplessly and are violently convulsed. The only remedy is to remove them to native pastures. In the last part of the Transactions of the Linnean Society (vol. xxx. part 2), Mr. Miers monographs the genera and species of the Lecythidaceae, the order to which belong the Bertholletia excelsa or Brazil nut, and Lecythis ollaria, the large woody capsules of which are known as "monkey-pots." The Lecythideae are treated by most English writers gies to the cellule or vesicle of Balbiani, with which we compare them." 66 The process of fecundation requires the action of several of the male elements, or spermatozoids, characterised by activity and disappearance through absorption in the female cell." From recent researches cited by M. Bernard, he regards spermatozoids as analogous to the embryonic vesicles, and believes that there is a parallelism between their formation and that of the egg, both resulting from a concurrence of the two sexual elements. He alludes with approval to M. E. van Beneden's theory, that there is "a morphological hermaphrodism in every animal individuality." "In vertebrate animals," he says, individual possesses the elements of the male and female sex in the two primitive layers of its blastoderm, and if at a later period one sex only is manifested, it is because the other sexual element has aborted." "each It is found in plants that if the pollen is not applied in sufficient quantities, the fertilisation is incomplete. The same thing occurs in animals, and M. Bernard thinks the phenomena of incom plete fertilisation have not been sufficiently studied. He is inclined to ascribe to it the fact of second or later offspring, often resembling the first males with which the females had contact. Reviewing the various theories of the generation of organic beings, M. Bernard observes: "Leibnitz considered all the phenomena of the universe as the simple consequence of the primordial act, creation. The creative power intervened once, and had no need to repeat the effort, the natural order of things being determined for all time. He expressed this in the aphorism semel jussit, semper paret. According to him there is no fresh point of generation properly so called, no fresh creation; the first being contained potentially, and in substance, all succeeding generations, and the observer can only witness the development of germs which were from the first included one within the other. The Genevese philosopher Bonnet adopted this view. He thought no animal really created the beings of which it was the source, but that each one contained germs enfolding each other, and throwing off successive envelopes. According to this mode of thought, however numerous might be the generations whose germs were thus superimposed, they were still limited in number: however remote the final period assigned to each species, it is nevertheless irrevocably fixed. Cuvier, whose genius for precision ill accommodated itself to hypotheses, received this with favour. He thought it the most satisfactory that had been proposed to explain the mystery of the multiplication of living beings." nomena of sexuality appear as two cellular ele- "from an ancestry by an inclusion (emboîtement) of "In the vegetable ovule there is a placental cord, a sible, but still subject to experimental determination, and that he affirms to be entirely against it. "It has," he says, "been driven in succession from the positions it occupied, and forced into regions that are obscure or unknown." He conIcluded the lecture from which these words are taken with the following passage: "Sexuality is the paramount, universal, and neces sary mode in which resides the true unity exhibited in the entire series of animals and plants. Its mechanisms may be very complicated and very numerous, but physiological analysis succeeds in demonstrating their essential identity when reduced to their elementary conditions. We have seen that sexuality plays the same parts in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and that their elementary mechanisms are the same; and we thus obtain a new and powerful analogy to add to those which previous lessons have disclosed." Accepting this unity in the organic world, can we stop there? Are we not led to conjecture that, as the imaginary boundaries formerly supposed to separate animals from plants have disappeared in the light of investigation, so the supposed limits separating the inorganic from the organic world will equally disappear when more is known of molecular physics? Is there no connexion between molecular and sexual bipolarity? 2 The chief new feature of the paper is two curves showing the barogram at Glasgow, and the prevalence of firedamp in the mines for the last nine months of 1873, as ascertained from the records which are now kept, in accordance with recent legislation. The accordance of these curves is naturally more striking than the figures given by the explosions. THE Cologne Gazette announces the death at Lund, in Sweden, on December 23, of the veteran entomologist, Professor J. W. Zetterstedt, who had reached the age of ninety. He held the chair of Natural History in the University of Lund from =1810 to 1853, and was noted as an efficient teacher and as a student of no inconsiderable merit in the department of science to which he had specially =directed his attention. 1 AT the December meeting in the Capitol of the Royal Accademia dei Lincei, it was decided that the prize of a gold medal, founded by Pietro Carpi, should be given for the best memoir upon Chemistry. An eulogium was pronounced upon their foreign member, the late Elie de Beaumont. able WE have received the report of the Sixth Annual Session of the American Philological Association, held at Hartford, July, 1874. It gives ample evidence of the interest which the science of language is exciting in America, and with more careful weeding there is every promise of a valucrop to come. There is a paper on " English Vowel-Mutation," present in "cag-keg," by Professor Haldeman. Many of the vowel-mutations, however, mentioned by the Professor are not Eng :lish at all, and ought to have been treated in a more historical spirit. The change from annual to perennial had taken place in Latin, annus, perennis; the change represented by charity and cherish belongs to French; and with regard to frantic and frenetic, the change is neither English, nor a change from a to e, but from e to a. In Mr. Fowler's 66 paper on Paradoxes in Language," there is the same absence of the historical method. Black is derived from the root bha, to shine, without any intermediate links. The transition of meaning is explained by the primary effects being light, brightness, whiteness; the secondary effects, a change in the colour of substances-blackening =(or darkening). Then follows an excellent address by Professor EF. A. March, which has been published sepaerately, giving an account of the work done by students of language during the past year. Å paper by Professor Tyler on "The Prepositions in the Homeric Poems" shows the increasing number of verbs compounded with prepositions by statistical tables founded on passages from the Iliad, Sophocles, Herodotus, and Xenophon. Such statistics are useful if carried out, not mechanically, but in a truly scholarlike spirit, as by Tycho Mommsen in his researches on the preposition perά; otherwise what has been said of all statistics, viz., that there is nothing more deceptive, will apply to linguistic statistics also. Professor Sewall enters on a new discussion of the "Distinction between the Subjunctive and Optative Moods," and arrives at the following conclusions: Professor Packard discusses Hom. Od. x. 81-86; Professor d'Ooge, the original number of orixo in Demosth. de Corona; Professor Short, the style of the Vulgate; Professor Whitney, the Proportional Elements of English Utterance; Dr. Trumbull, the connexion between the Numerals and the Names of the Fingers in the American Languages. The next sitting was opened by the Rev. C. W. Ernst, with a minute analysis of the German vowels. He was followed by Colonel Higginson, who read a most interesting essay on the history of the idea embodied in the word φιλανθρωπία, and remarked that Max Müller's statement that "humanity is a word for which you look in vain in Plato or Aristotle," requires some qualification. The word gav@pwría, however, means only love of man, which is now somewhat barbarously called Altruism, while humanity in the sense of the brotherhood of the human race, is, after all, a postclassical idea. It is difficult to judge of the character of a paper read by Professor Harkness "On the Formation of the Tenses for Completed Action in the Latin Finite Verb," from a mere abstract. Professor Fischer's remarks on the origin of sunt qui with the subjunctive, exhibits the true spirit of historical scholarship; and Mr. Morris, too, shows himself well read, in his paper "On the Age of Xenophon at the time of the Anabasis." Professor Whitney read a paper on the Relation of Vowels and Consonants, and constructs a theory of a new, but somewhat fanciful alphabet. Professor van Benschoten in his remarks on "Dr. Schliemann's Discoveries at Hissarlik," expresses his opinion that Dr. Schliemann, in spite of his over-great enthusiasm verging on insanity, has done the world an incalculable service. Dr. Keep criticises the Rev. Isaac Taylor's Etruscan Researches, showing that the author lacks discrimination as well as special knowledge. Dr. Trumbull's remarks on "Names for Heart, Liver, and Lungs," contains curious material. The last papers are-one by Professor Comfort, "On Helveticisms in Schiller's Tell;' an important essay by Professor Berghen, showing the Hamitic character of the Agaou language, spoken by the Falasha Jews in Abyssinia; some notes by Professor Whitney, trying to show that θέσις in language is φύσει; and some remarks by Mr. Swinton on 66 English as the Universal Language." The next meeting will be held at Newport, R.I., beginining on Tuesday, July 13, 1875. MEETINGS OF SOCIETIES. ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE (December 22). PROFESSOR BUSK, F.R.S., President, in the Chair. Mr. J. Park Harrison exhibited tracings of late Phoenician characters still in use in the southwest of Sumatra. They differed entirely from early letters in other parts of the island. The natives had a tradition that some descendant of Alexander settled there; and if Nearchus' second expedition, the account of which is lost, and the Tyrian and Sidonian mariners who formed part of it, reached the Bay of Bengal, the date, Mr. Harrison considered, would agree sufficiently well with the letters. Colonel Lane Fox read a paper on Early Modes of Navigation, in which he described the various contrivances employed by savage races for transit on the water. Commencing with the simple trunk canoe, the author traced the development of the art of boat and ship-building through the stages of stitched-plank canoes, bark canoes, rafts, outrigger canoes (single and double), the double canoe, the variation of hull, the weather platform, the rudder, and the rude sail, and gave the distribution of their many forms and modifications. It was argued that the rude bark float of the Australian, the Tasmanian and the Ethiopian, the catamaran of the Papuan, the dug-out canoe of the New Zealander, and the built-up canoe of the Samoan were survivals representing successive stages in the development of the art of shipstruction as the result of degradation; that each building-not lapses to ruder methods of constage supplies us with examples of what at one time was the perfection of the art countless ages ago. Some of the more primitive kinds spread over nearly the whole world, whilst others had a more limited area of distribution. Taken together they enable us to trace back the history of shipbuilding from the time of the earliest sculptures to the commencement of the art. FINE ART. TWO ART BOOKS. Roman Imperial Profiles, enlarged from Coins. Arranged by John Edward Lee, F.S.A., F.G.S. (Longmans, 1874.) It is quite possible that by this series of 160 lithographic profiles Mr. Lee will succeed in his desire to be "useful to coin collectors, especially those who are beginning to study The scheme of the book is good, numismatics." and particularly worthy of commendation is the idea of presenting the profiles without the distracting accompaniment of legend and border which numismatists insist on reproducing. But we would advise the general reader, to whom Mr. Lee next hopes they will be interesting, to suspend judgment and not to commit himself at once to "faith in the accuracy of the profiles," for in the first place it is obvious from the nature of things that the process of enlarging from coins must be beset with a danger of exaggeration which ought to be rigorously met by reference to such other authentic portraits as those of existing busts and gems wherever they may be available. With the small surface at his command the die sinker was compelled to intensify every little peculiarity of profile to satisfy the demand for realistic portraiture for which the Romans, following in the footsteps of the late Greeks, were conspicuous. Is it then possible for a modern artist to correct these exaggerations solely by means of a "knowledge of the it is, and we certainly cannot admit that it has anatomy of the human face"? We doubt whether been done in the book before us. Take, for example, the head of Trajan (plate xxxviii.) and compare it with the marble head of him in the British Museum. In the marble his low forehead and fleshy eyebrows constitute a remarkable, but neither an unpleasant nor an unnatural feature. In the plate they are made to destroy his intelligence and to render repulsive a face which the general reader at least would gladly look upon. Brutus again, there is no doubt, was in personal aspect far from the standard of Apollo or Adonis, but on the unmagnified coins and on a small amethyst in the British Museum the man is there recognisable behind his leanness, and this is more than can be said of plate iv. Portraits of Julius Caesar are to be found in a marble head and on two engraved gems in the Museum, and it has been not unfrequently the case that admirers of his career have expressed themselves satisfied with the resemblance to their ideal. Plate ii. will greatly disappoint them. As for Cleopatra (plate viii.) it may be said that not having had by nature a Roman profile, she might well have been omitted from the volume. Her charms lay not in her profile. We can look with pleasure on the fine cameo of Augustus in the British Museum, or on the numerous busts of him, and find no discrepancy between his features and the ideal suggested by the age of refinement to which he gave the impetus as well as a name. On the other hand, not a few-particularly among the female portraits of later times-appear to be highly satisfactory. Indeed, the mixture of good and bad plates is precisely such as to support the statement with which we set out, viz., that a process of enlargement from coins must be guesswork unless checked by reference to other authenticated portraits. The short biographical notices which accompany the lithographs are expressly stated to be almost entirely translated from Mionnet. Still they are highly simple. On p. 60 we read DEO SARAPIDI (sic). If the sic is Mionnet's, it is of course his fault. Sarapis is now understood to be a better reading than Serapis. tion is surprising, since it would appear from the book. A. S. MURRAY. WINTER EXHIBITION OF OLD MASTERS AT THE (First Notice.) THOSE whose duty calls them to a special study of The Types of the Gods and Heroes in Greek Art [Heroen und Götter-Gestalten]. By Alexander Conze. (Vienna.) With a book of this kind one turns first to the plates, of which there are here 106. The result is not one of unmixed pleasure, for this reason, that though the subjects are taken from works of ancient art exhibiting in themselves the greatest variety in point of execution, there pervades these plates an uniformity which must have stolen its way in from the imagination of the modern artist. Yet it would have been particularly agreeable had it been otherwise in a work like this, the object of which is not only to show how the forms and aspect of the gods and heroes were conceived and rendered by artists of the best time, but also to trace these conceptions to their earliest manifestation in existing monuments. Fortunately the transitions which occurred at different periods are sufficiently marked in the originals to remain still readily appreciable when taken along with the text for which, after all, it is to be remembered that these plates were intended to serve as illustrations. The text is admirable, as might be expected from the previous writings of Professor Conze, and this implies the greater praise since mythological research is a field in which he had not before appeared. Nor is it a field in which hitherto brevity has been aimed at, except with the result of some very stray shooting. If it is pardonable to pursue this metaphor, it might be said that Professor Conze is constantly scoring. Sometimes it seems as if what he gives The collection is of such a scale and character in the way of mythology had been composed after that you can readily and happily make yourself at a thoughtful study of Welaker's Götterlehre, fol- home in it. The vestibule and five rooms of the lowed by repeated visits to Greece itself, from Academy's gallery are furnished, not crowded, which vivid impressions of natural phenomena with two hundred and sixty-nine paintings, all had been brought back. Take, for instance, what within comfortable distance of the eye. This, he says of the goddess Athene. It was Welcker I think, is the smallest number of works that who had identified her as originally a personifica- has ever been brought together at one of these tion of that light which dawns over the sky before shows. But among this number the proportion the sun rises and seems to be quite independent of of positive masterpieces is high, and there is him-the same light which in the Mosaic account scarcely anything that has not some historical of the creation appeared and was approved on the interest, or that without respect to personal first day, while the sun and moon were not created likes and dislikes one has reason to wish away. till the fourth. But it is Conze who, besides Quality would here make up for quantity, even sparing the intricacy of Welcker, communicates if the defect of quantity were itself a thing to the description the freshness of his own sensa- to be deplored. But the judicious student cares tions at daybreak in Greece. Or again, when the more to master and remember a few beautiful question concerns the wine god, we are invited to things than to skim and forget a great many. He the vale of the Eurotas in May time, to visit the will not be inclined to deplore the moderate modern village of Parori, where numerous springs number of works exhibited, or at any rate not play among the old plane trees, and from the for its own sake, but only if he takes it rustic verandah of an hospitable Greek we may as a sign that the sources of these exhibioverlook a sea of blossom and fruit, the golden tions are running dry. And that ought not orange in its dark foliage—a sight which Mignon to be. It is certain that in thus taking upon had not forgotten-fig trees and pomegranates in itself, only on a larger scale, the task of the old wild profusion. These are the gifts of the god British Institution, and inviting together from who in moist, well-watered districts produces all right and left examples of the great ancient the precious juicy fruits, just as Demeter gives schools and of our own school down to its last the grain. We are to remember that Dionysos stage but one, the Royal Academy does more was more than the god of wine, and that the than it could do in any other way for the ingaiety of his festivals was not all inspired by it, terests of art in England. It is no less certain but in certain districts at least, as among the stern that the materials capable of being brought Spartans of the Eurotas valley, arose from irrepres- together upon such invitation, to our infinite insible joy at the aspect of nature in May time. It struction and delight, are as far as possible from was the abundance of his gifts that struck the being exhausted. What we have seen within the senses, and hence, like Hermes, he had, especially last six years has been little more than a sample in early times, the characteristic of productivity. of the vast riches which have flowed into this When the character of a deity has been thus country from abroad, or been disseminated over mythologically interpreted, there follows a state- it from within, from the sixteenth century till ment of the process by which with various stages to-day. It has been little more than enough to it was embodied in marble and bronze or reflected tantalise us with thinking of the mighty and in painting. At first the effect of this juxtaposi-peerless public gallery, or system of galleries, that we might possess in England if these treasures could be drawn forth, from the castles and manor houses and town and country palaces where they lie scattered, into the custody of the State or the great municipalities. That private zeal should have collected them is well; but that private custody should keep them in the dark seems to the lover of art, the lover of beauty and genius, the lover of the past, like an injurious infringement of his right to know and to enjoy. It is conceivable that a day may come when the State and the municipalities will be ready to bid for the works of the immortals at a price which the wealthiest private owner will not care to refuse. But till then, there is only one consolation for those to whom knowing and enjoying the works of the immortals is the salt of life; and that is when they are brought out from their places of shelter for occasions of exhibition and study like the present. Such occasions are expected with a growing eagerness. There is a growing public desire to make the most of them. And hence, one might hope, a growing motive for possessors to bring their treasures out. The pleasure to the student, the gain to his study, are so immense; the private inconvenience so slight. So great is the risk which science and the community run continually from the accidents of private custody, from neglect or fire; so small that which private interest runs from the accidents of transport and exhibition for the benefit of the community and of science. One might hope, I say, that considerations of this kind would press more strongly every day upon the possessors of old masters; and then the winter exhibitions at Burlington House would go on and prosper. But it looks a little as if those great collectors or inheritors of collections, who felt the force of such considerations, had done the best they could from the first, and To as if those who failed to feel their force at first Certainly no exhibition of old masters has called for so little criticism as this on the score of pictures that would have been better away, or of titles and ascriptions due to the carelessness of 1 JAN. 9, 1875.] an owner or his delusion. Let the little that needs saying on either of these heads be said and done with. No. 190 is not by Luini, but by one of the late and weak hands of the Milanese school in its decay; and is full of repainting. No. 177 is given to a "painter unknown," whereas it is a valuable and perfectly indisputable fragment of Luca Signorelli. No. 188 is a fine specimen of the portrait art of Ghirlandaio; but the Sassetti were not counts. No. 130 is an injured-almost a ruined Saint Catherine of the Venetian school, with her wheel of martyrdom and palm of recompense, and the emblematic unicorn in the landscape: we are informed that its title "Queen of the Gipsies" is a misprint in the catalogue for Queen of Cyprus (i.e., of course, Catherine Cornaro), though I do not think the features are hers. Scarcely less difficult to accept is the title given to No. 167. No. 51 is a work of suspicious appearance. Here and there a Venetian picture is set down to a master when it is due to a scholar. Here and there are some questionable names of those who have sat for portraits. If there are more points of this kind that need making, there will be plenty of eyes to detect them. Nay, I see that in some quarters points of this kind, and some of them quite imaginary, have been very ungraciously insisted on already. I pass from the negative to the positive parts of what I have to say. Once or twice before, the English master or masters lately dead, whose works have been chosen for exhibition side by side with those of the old schools, have been accommodated apart. This time the histories of Maclise and the landscapes of Calcott are distributed at large among the Titians and Rubenses and Rembrandts and Vandycks and Claudes. The arrangement is very favourable to comparison and contrast. No school or period occupies any one gallery quite to itself. In the first room the older English school prevails in figure and landscape; with Hogarth and Reynolds and Romney; with two unsurpassable Gainsboroughs; with Stubbs and Morland; and, coming into our own century, with Crome, Cotman, and Brooking. But Gainsborough's exquisite Sisters smile across the room at Maclise's Caxton in his Printing Office; and Cuyp and Ruysdael and Canaletto are there beside Collins and Calcott. The second gallery has nearly the same constituents, with additions from the Low Countries-a Ruysdael, a Teniers, a Vandevelde, and several rare portraits of Vandyck. In the great third gallery the north wall is the place of honour; and here are half-adozen superb Venetian pieces with one or two not so good, flanked on either hand by a landscape of Turner and of Salvator, and beyond these by two boy portraits of Velazquez that make even the canvases of Venice look pale. On the opposite side of the room are two great Rembrandts, one of them from the collection of the Queen; at the west end a hurtling scene of the Conversion of St. Paul, by Rubens; with the intervals filled by portraits of Antonio More, Franz Hals, Vandyck, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and landscapes of Rubens, Ruysdael,Cuyp, and Turner. The fourth room is in part given up, by what has now become a kind of prescription, to the pictures of the earlier religious schools of Italy, Of the Lippis; the Crivelli; the two mystical altar-pieces of the Florentine school; the Signorelli aforesaid; a portrait piece by Ghirlandaio; a Fra Bartolommeo and an Andrea del Sarto; with a Saint ascribed to the early days of Raphael: of these and more I shall have occasion to say something next week. But they have not got the fourth gallery to themselves: they share it with more portraits of Vandyck, and with saints of Zurbaran and landscapes of Gaspar and Canaletto. Here alone are no English. But in the fifth room they prevail again-Morland and Zoffany and Wright of Derby and Opie, together with the greater Gainsborough and Reynolds, and in the company, once more, of Calcott and Maclise. A natural way of taking such an exhibition, and discussing the matters of criticism and history which it suggests, would be by separate schools. But I prefer to take the hint set by the system that has been employed in hanging. I propose to dwell on these points of contrast and comparison that arise not by separating schools, but by mixing them, and seeing how a succession of different schools deals with the same order of conceptions. Thus our study will be divided, not according to schools, but according to subjects. It will begin next week with the class of sacred pictures; and here, of course, the painters of Italy will predominate. We shall go on to portraits; and in this class we have masterpieces of all schools to consider | together, with their affinities and their differences. Next will come landscapes and pastorals; and here the English will prevail, though we shall have to attend to other chords mightily struck before ever there was a school of painting in England. And lastly, we shall come to pictures of history and imagination not religious; in which-at least as to bulk-the work of our own countrymen will more than ever have the preponderance. SIDNEY COLVIN. THE WATER-COLOUR SOCIETY. ONE can pass a very agreeable hour or two in the Gallery of this Society, looking at "the thirteenth Winter Exhibition of Sketches and Studies by the Members," which opened on the 4th instant. The average of the contributions is skilful, facile, and attractive, although not much beyond that can be said in favour of any of them save the fewest. The associates and the younger members of the body count for more, in the general result, than the elder members. A Street-Scene, Tangier. Both these paintings have a pale warm brownish tone, much local character and choiceness of work, and more uniformity of ease than used to be the case with the productions, always remarkable for talent and uncommonness, of this artist. The principal faces, however, are stippled up to a morbid degree, not unfairly to be termed "finikin; " while some of the hands, on the contrary, are slurred. Mr. Marsh's picture is named Love among the Roses, and represents two young lovers of the last century standing slightly apart in a garden, with their backs turned to the spectator. Immediately in front of them is a green garden seat of awkwardly cumbrous make, and behind this is a clump of vari-coloured rosebushes, to which a sunset-flushed sky forms the sole background. This is a work of rich sweet colour, and (as our description may already have indicated to the reader) of much peculiarity of general treatment; that sort of peculiarity which consists in reducing a subject to its barest and least suggestive rudiments, and then educing from these a certain harmony and delicacy, a nicety of poise and reserve of significance, which raise the thing up again into the level of artistic if not of intellectual conception. It is a sort of new start (now not a little in vogue) in the method of presentment; not worth trying at all until after been long in use and well worked out, but, under the more obvious and more complete methods have this condition, involving a kind of originality, and at any rate demanding, if it is to be in any degree successful, a great amount of aptitude and skill in workmanship. Mr. Marsh has managed to produce in this way one of the very best pictures in the Gallery. He has several others here, mostly Four leading exhibitors are Sir John Gilbert, of the landscape class; all worthy of notice, but the President of the Society, Mr. Houghton, Mr. none rivalling the Love among the Roses. Mr. Pinwell, and Mr. A. H. Marsh. The first-named R. W. Macbeth sends various productions, some of artist is very fairly represented by his Prisoners which may be referred to the same general principle of War, an incident of the Parliamentarian camof treatment as this one by Mr. Marsh; especially A paign in one of the northern counties; the Notary Favourite Customer (the "customer" himself not Public and his Grandchildren (from Longfellow's being seen, but only the greengrocer and his Evangeline), pleasant in composition and in feel- daughter, who have their own trade-reasons for ing, though executed in a rather offhand fashion; making him a "favourite"), and Pleasant Hours, and Cade and his Rabblement, howling and which we cannot regard as a fortunate specimen of tramping through the streets of London with the style. Here we see a gentleman and lady fire and steel, like so many devils broken loose. seated on a bench under a tree, and looking as if the There are other works by this painter, in-hours were anything but markedly pleasant to cluding several small landscape sketches. Mr. them. He leans forward, whittling at a twig: Houghton makes she sits backward, making a rather demonstrative a very bold venture in selecting as his subject The Enchanted Horse display of a rose held against her knee, and bent (Arabian Nights); more especially as he does not (if we understand the subject aright) upon getting represent the courser soaring upwards, as most him to do or say something gallant in so opporpainters would have done, so as to give the thing tune a tête-à-tête. Apart from some strong qualias much of an air of possibility as it will bear, but ties of execution, we can find little of an attractive galloping right forward upon nothing. He is all kind in this picture. The case is quite otherwise coated with a curious coloured patterning, supple- with another of Mr. Macbeth's contributions, enmented by elaborate housings. A flock of wild titled Evening-a domestic interior of remarkable geese cross the sky behind the horse and his refinement and grace. The husband is reading at riders. To treat so eccentric a theme once in a a table, a little severed from the rest of the family way may be permissible to an artist having a -his wife, who sings as she touches the piano, somewhat exceptional direction of faculty; and no grouped along with three girls and a boy. The doubt Mr. Houghton has done with it what few only point which we can raise as an objection of his contemporaries could have achieved. An- against this beautiful composition is that the relaother subject from the Arabian Nights-The tion between the lady and her juvenile auditors is Transformation of King Beder-is less bizarre, too ambiguous. One naturally presupposes them though still peculiar enough, and is proportion- to be her children; but her very youthful aspect ately more satisfying. Beder has been metamor-not more than twenty-three years of age, perphosed by the sorceress into a beautiful crane: haps negatives the possibility of her having a she curtseys to him sarcastically—an action that son of thirteen at the very least. It may be, howhas not a very oriental look-making a great disever, that Mr. Macbeth has pourtrayed some real play of the rich shawl-patterning of her skirt. family exactly as they look, and then any such Her female attendant, just behind her, smirks objection collapses into hypercriticism. and sneers in unison. This capital work is replete with minute details, which are, however, for the most part, handled with considerable freedom. The Fireside shows a boy and girl taking their pastime on a tigerskin rug: this picture, also, has no little oddity of aspect, and, as it is oddity with no particular meaning at the core of it, we incline to think it somewhat excessive. Mr. Pinwell takes two Moorish subjects, The Prison-hole, Tangier, Women Visiting a Prisoner, and The Auctioneer, Mr. Watson exhibits no fewer than twenty-three water-colours. Among these we may specify Barnaby Rudge; The Chimney Corner-a gentleman, after a hard ride on a cold day, seated in the ingle-nook of a humble out-country inn, and lighting his pipe; A Welcome Visitor, a maid carrying hog-wash to the pig-stye, within which the impatiently expectant pig stands up, projecting his hooves and face over the door; and The Lost Path, where a gentleman and his daughter, plodding along in discomfort and bewilderment, |