fragmentary things, but, as Plato long ago announced, with wholes-things perfect. And the vision which brightens upon the mental eye of the sculptor when rapt in the inspired work of conception, is not a skeleton Apollo, or a Venus de Medicis in bones; but those charming figures complete,―nay, more perfect than ever chisel can copy,-nay, not even arrayed in the cold pure marble, but, primarily, in the radiant beauty and brilliance of ideal life itself. An artist's knowledge of anatomy serves merely as a corrective to his conceptionsnothing more. Poor Haydon, when young, and when entering on that career of painting which he was destined to pursue amidst such troubles and end in such misery, used to walk up and down with his Sister, their arms around each other's neck,— she questioning him about bones and muscles and joints, and he repeating the proper answers thereto. But for all this training —and, I may add, despite an enthusiastic perseverance that might have made him excel in almost any profession—he never attained in perfection to that fine sense of Form, which in Painting is necessary, but which in Sculpture is indispensable.

H

ETHNOLOGY OF EUROPE

"THERE were brave men before Agamemnon"-heroes before there was a Homer to sing them, says that prince of sensible poets, Horace. It is not less true that there were nations before history-communities, races, of which the eye of civilisation never caught a glimpse. In some cases, before the light of history broke in upon their seclusion, those old types of mankind, losing their individuality, had become merged in a succeeding and mightier wave of population. In other cases they had wholly disappeared: they had lived and fought and died in perfect isolation from every focus of civilisation, and left not even a floating legend behind them in the world. Man's mortality-the destiny of the Individual to pass away from earth like a vapour, making room for others, heirs of his wisdom and unimbued with his prejudices-is the most familiar of truths; but the mortality of Nations, the death of races, is a conception which at first staggers us. That a family should grow into a nation, that from the loins of one man should descend a seed like unto the sands on the sea-shore for multitude, appears to our everyday senses as a natural consequence; but that nations should dwindle down to families, and families into solitary individuals, until death gets all, and earth has swallowed up a whole phase of humanity, is a thought the grandeur of which is felt to be solemn, if not appalling. The conception, however, need not be a strange one. Facts, which reconcile us to everything, are

testifying to its truth even at the present day. It is not long since the Guanches in the Canary Islands, that last specimen of what may once have been a race, and the Guarras in Brazil, dwindled out of existence in their last asylum,-expiring at the feet of the more lordly race which the fulness of time brought to their dwellings.

Year by year

Not to mention the Miaou-tse in China, and other relics of Asiatic races, the same phenomenon is most impressively presented to us among the Red Men of America, where the old race is seen dying out beneath our very eyes. they are melting away. Of the millions which once peopled the vast regions on this side of the Mississippi river, all have vanished but a few scattered families; and it is as clear as the sun at noonday, that in a few generations more, the last of the Red Men will be numbered with the dead. Why, is it asked, are they thus doomed? A few years ago, in the suburbs of Mobile, or wandering through its streets, you might have seen the remnant of the Choctaw tribe, covered with nothing but blankets, and living in bark tents, scarcely a degree advanced above the beasts of the field. They have now gone farther west, towards the setting sun, which symbolises their destiny. No philanthropy can civilise them,-no ingenuity can induce them to do an honest day's work. The life of the woods is struck from them,-the white man has taken their huntinggrounds; and they live on helpless as in a dream, quietly abiding their time. They are stationary, they will not advance; and, like everything stationary, the world is sweeping them away. They sufficed for the first phase of humanity in the New World. So long as there was only need for man to be lord of the woods and of the animal creation, the Red Man did well; but no sooner did the call come for him to perfect himself, and change the primeval forest into gardens, than the Red Man knew, by mysterious instinct, that his mission was over,and either allowed himself, in sheer apathy, to sink out of existence among the pitiless feet of the new-comers, or died fighting

fiercely with the apostles of a civilisation which he hated but could not comprehend.

Far back in the history of Europe and of our own countryor rather, we should say, in periods entirely pre-historic—it is now known that a similar disappearance of a human race has taken place. Celt and Teuton, we fancy, were the first occupiers of Europe,-but the case is not so. A wave or waves of population had preceded even them; and as we dig down into the soil beneath us, ever and anon we come upon strange and startling traces of those primeval occupants of the land. In those natural museums of the past, the caves and peat-bogs of Europe, the keen-witted archæologists of present times are finding abundant relics of a race dissimilar from all the human varieties of which written history takes cognisance. The researches of Wilson among the peat-bogs of the British Isles have brought to light traces of no less than two distinct preCeltic races inhabiting the land, one of which had the skull of a singularly broad and short, square and compact form, while the head of the other race was long and very narrow, or "boat-shaped." The exhumations of Retzius show that similar races once inhabited Scandinavia. The caves and ossuaries of Franconia and Upper Saxony prove that in Central Europe, also, there were races before the advent of the Celts; and the researches of Boucher de Perthes, amid the alluvial stratifications of the river Somme, indicate a not less ancient epoch for the cinerary urns, bones, and instruments of a primordial people in France.

Here," says M. de Perthes, "we naturally inquire, who were these mysterious primitive inhabitants of Gaul? We are told that this part of Europe is of modern origin, or at least of recent population. Its annals scarcely reach to twenty centuries, and even its traditions do not exceed two thousand five hundred years. The various people who are known to history as having occupied it—the Galls, the Celts, the Veneti, Ligurians, Iberians, Cymbrians, and Scythians-have left no vestiges

to which we can assign that date. The traces of those [originally] nomadic tribes who ravaged Gaul scarcely precede the Christian era by a few centuries. Was Gaul, then, a desert, a solitude, before this period? Was its sun less genial, or its soil less fertile? Were not its hills as pleasant, and its plains and valleys as ready for the harvest? Or, if men had not yet learned to plough and sow, were not its rivers filled with fish, and its forests with game? And, if the land abounded with everything calculated to attract and support a population, why should it not have been inhabited? The absence of great ruins, indeed, indicates that Gaul at this period, and even much later, had not attained a great degree of civilisation, nor been the seat of powerful kingdoms; but why should it not have had its towns and villages?—or rather, why should it not, like the steppes of Russia, the prairies and virgin forests of America, and the fertile plains of Africa, have been overrun from time immemorial by tribes of men-savages, perhaps, but nevertheless united in families if not in nations?"

We shall not dwell at present upon the relics of those races who have thus preceded all history, and vanished into their graves before a civilised age could behold them. We shall not accompany M. de Perthes in his various excavations, nor, after passing through the first stratum of soil, and coming to the relics of the Middle Ages, see him meet subsequently, in regular order, with traces of the Roman and Celtic periods, until at last he comes upon weapons, utensils, figures, signs, and symbols, which must have been the work of a surpassingly ancient people. We need not describe his discovery of successive beds of bones and ashes, separated from each other by strata of turf and tufa, with no less than five different stages of cinerary urns, belonging to distinct generations, of which the oldest were deposited below the woody or diluvian turf,-nor the coarse structure of these vases (made by hand and dried in the sun), nor the rude utensils of bone, or roughly-carved stone, by which they were surrounded. Neither need we do more than allude to the re