_The Transformation of Insects._ By P. MARTIN DUNCAN, F.R.S. Cassell,
Petter, and Galpin.
The metamorphoses of insects comprise some of the most interesting
phenomena of the most attractive class in the animal kingdom. They lose
none of their attractions in the hands of the enterprising publishers to
whose energy the public are already indebted for so many handsome and
profusely illustrated works on various branches of natural history.
The present volume, like the rest, abounds in pictures of all kinds,
from those which are diagrammatic, and should accompany a scientific
treatise, to those which are highly pictorial and life-like; and they
are all of high merit. Of course, the illustrations, for the most part,
are not original. They do not come from the hand of the author, nor were
they designed to illustrate his text. No work with such first-class
engravings, drawn expressly to elucidate the meaning of a writer, could
be produced at ten times the cost of the book before us. Collected from
all sources, and more or less judiciously distributed through the
volume, the plates constitute the chief value of the work. The
letter-press, however, like the illustrations, is full of interesting
matter. Almost all the well-known facts which science has revealed to us
concerning the whole life-history of the _Arthropoda_, are stripped of
their technical phraseology, invested in an amusing, and sometimes a
grotesque garb, and displayed so as to attract those to whom real
scientific study would be repulsive. To our youth, and to that numerous
class of casual and unscientific observers of Nature who rather delight
in interesting facts than in the causes which underlie them, 'The
Transformation' will, no doubt, be found amusing and satisfactory. On
the other hand, we are bound to state that there is nothing in the book
before us, either in the shape of original contribution to our
information, or of philosophic grouping of phenomena into wider
generalizations, which will really assist the scientific student.
We have purposely mentioned the publishers rather than the author as the
originators of this work, because the resources of the former are far
more evident than those of the latter. Probably no one but the
publishers could have produced so handsome and entertaining a volume at
so small an expense, while almost any one might have been the author of
it. We have also designedly made the plates occupy the first place in
our commendation. It is evident that the book was made to order from a
large stock in hand. We do not wish to disparage the work at all, or any
more than is necessary to let the public know exactly what it is. Such a
book would not be written except to order, and could not be so good
unless there were a large stock of material on hand. Such books have a
definite use, and this particular book is good of its kind. It is, as it
professes to be, an 'adaptation of M. Emile Blanchard's work.' If the
author had done for his own work what he has done for M. Blanchard,
_i.e._, 'eliminated large portions which, although very interesting, do
not refer directly to the phenomena of metamorphosis,' we should have
been deprived of half the volume; and as the illustrations could hardly
have been crowded more closely together, we should have lost them also,
and this would have been a great pity. That the letter-press is but
accessory, and sometimes hardly accessory, to the pictures is abundantly
manifest. Thus, at p. 366, we have a beautiful engraving representing
the transformations of _Cicada fraxini_--an insect belonging to, and
even the type of, the homopterous division of the order
'Hemiptera'--incorporated, without reference to it, into the chapter on
the 'Neuroptera;' while, in the chapter on the 'Hemiptera,' the
metamorphosis of the same species is described without reference to the
engraving.
The term 'insects' is used in the old Linnæan sense, and not according
to its more modern and definite scientific signification, and so is made
to include not only moths, bees, beetles, locusts, dragon-flies, bugs,
and flies, and the orders of which they are the types, but also
spiders, hundred-legs, and crustaceans. _The Metamorphoses of the
Arthropoda_ would be the more correct title, but this would not have
been so popular, and therefore not so well suited to a popular work.
This dominant idea of rendering the book popular is always kept in view.
Thus, when we have a description of the habits of that popular
favourite, the water spider (_Argyroneta aquatica_), it is hoped, no
doubt with some degree of confidence, that we shall be so pleased with
the wonderful facts, that we shall forgot to ask why a species which has
no metamorphosis, and belongs to a genus, family, and order which never
exhibit transformations, should have been introduced to our notice at
all. Again, when we are facetiously told that _Cimex lectularius_ drops
from the ceiling on to sleepers, and grows more or less rapidly
according to the temperature of the room and corpulency of its
inhabitants, and we have 'to thank Providence that it has no wings,' it
would be ill-natured to inquire whether the statements are strictly
accurate, and with regard to the latter statement, to whom we are
indebted for the rest of the anatomy?
Mr. Duncan thinks it only just that M. E. Blanchard should be relieved
from the authorship of opinions as to the nature of metamorphosis
contained in this work, but as the only part of the book which treats of
metamorphosis philosophically consists of a long, well-chosen, and
acknowledged quotation from Newport's 'Essay,' we think this delicate
sense of justice somewhat misplaced.
We cannot too highly recommend the 'Transformation of Insects' as a
glorious picture-book full of moderately trustworthy anecdotes; but we
warn all students of physiology or natural history that there is no such
royal road to learning as its pages present.
_Rome and the Campagna: an Historical and Topographical Description of
the Site, Buildings, and Neighbourhood of Ancient Rome._ By ROBERT BURN,
M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge. Deighton and Co.
1871.
There is something singularly opportune in the publication of this book
at this time. Rome, dear to all men of taste, for its countless
treasures in the department of the arts--to all scholars, for its
multitudinous associations with relics of classical times--to many a
Christian too, for its memories of our holy religion, has just passed
into new hands, and is henceforth to be subject to other rulers. We will
not affect to regret this. We have long despaired of any substantial
improvement under the _régime_ now happily brought to an end; but there
can be no reason, in the nature of things, why modern Rome should be the
worst drained and dirtiest of Christian cities, and why the Pontine
marshes, once so fruitful, should now be a pestiferous waste. We believe
that a thorough revolution may be worked, both in Rome itself and all
around it, not only without any detriment to those precious relics of
the old world with which this volume deals, but with great advantage to
them; and we hope to read ere long of the appointment of a commission
(we are not sure what is the proper Italian word for it) with some such
man as the Cavaliere Rosa at its head, whose business it shall be to
guard with jealous care whatever already discovered may interest the
student of art or of history, and to watch for new matter of a kindred
nature wherever public works or private enterprise may lay open the
still unworked mines which underlie in all directions the accumulated
rubbish of many centuries in this city of Rome. A board of antiquaries
and artists, with two or three practical men amongst them, may earn for
themselves the gratitude of the civilized world, by an enlightened and
earnest prosecution of this work.
As to the book before us, we can hardly find words to express our sense
of its varied excellence. It has evidently been a _con amore_ labour
with its author; and he has brought to his work the three qualifications
essential to its thorough discharge--learning, sagacity, and zeal. His
references to the classical writings of Rome, and to those who have been
his pioneers in these researches, prove the first; while the accuracy
with which he observes and compares both objects and opinions are
sufficient evidence of the other qualities.
Starting with a geological discussion of the soil on which the city is
built, we are introduced to the original materials for building in Rome
and its immediate neighborhood. There is abundant evidence of volcanic
action in the tufaceous rock which is characteristic of the region; and
this is associated with the depositions of water--both salt and
fresh--and in some cases has been manifestly modified by their action.
Indeed, there is proof that the valleys between the famous hills were
marshes, frequently flooded by the Tiber, down into the early period of
Roman history. There are two sorts of tufa, one more granular, and so
lighter than the other, as well as a fair portion of a limestone rock,
named travertine, harder than either of the tufas; besides these there
is capital clay for bricks, and matter which makes the best mortar in
the world. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that not only during
the Republic, but in later times, when, under the emperors, the wealth
and luxury of the Romans was boundless, the main substance even of the
most magnificent of their buildings was brick; and marble 'facings,'
columns, and pavements came in to give finish and beauty to their solid
brickwork. Indeed, to this fact we owe it that so much is still left to
us. The barbarous rapacity of the Middle Ages, which ruthlessly
appropriated these enrichments, would no doubt have taken all, had all
been marble.
Our author regards the myths which connect the early Romans with the
Greeks, and with the Trojans under Æneas, as belonging rather to the
domain of poetry than history, and confining himself to the facts as
illustrated by these ruins, begins with the Palatine, as the hill
originally occupied by the first fathers of the Romans; and he gives us,
in chronological order, as far as possible, notices of all ruins now
uncovered there. He then passes on to the Capitoline, as having been
occupied next in point of time, dealing with it in the same manner;
after this we return southward to the Aventine; thence, turning east, we
cross the valley of the Circus Maximus to the Cælian Hill, and then
proceed northward to the Esquiline, the Viminal, Quirinal, and Pincian,
in succession. On all these we are introduced to the remains of ancient
buildings; their chronology, their identity, their extent, their present
condition, and their associations with such historic matter as has come
down to us, are all set before us with great accuracy of detail. Then we
cross the Tiber, and visit Janiculum and the Vatican Hill; recrossing
into the valleys among the hills, we visit the Circus Maximus, the
Campus Martius (now occupied by the modern city), and the Via Lata. The
'Forum' (Romanum) is discussed in the earlier part of the work, and with
it the Fora of the emperors, which were meant to supersede it and its
associations, and did so. The line of the walls of Servius, built mainly
of the tufa already mentioned, in large rectangular blocks, is traced
all round the city with ingenious care; and then the more extensive
walls of Aurelian, with notices of the fortifications of the present
day. Before we have done we take a delightful, though hasty, run through
the Campagna. We visit Hadrian, at his villa Tiburtina (Tivoli); Cicero,
at Tusculum (Frascati); and dear old Horace, at his Sabine farm. At
Laurentum we inspect, in detail, the country seat of our communicative
host, the unlucky Pliny, who perished miserably when Pompeii was
destroyed.
We would gratefully acknowledge our sense of obligation to our
intelligent guide; and shall reckon it henceforward as among our
pleasantest reminiscences that we have thus visited with him the spot
where Virginia bled, where Cicero spoke, where Cæsar fell; that we have,
in his company, trodden the Forum, the Capitol, and the Appian way; and
wandered, silent and awe-stricken at their grandeur, in the golden house
of Nero, the Forum of Trajan, the Coliseum of Vespasian, and the baths
of Diocletian.
We must not close our notice without a word about the maps and ground
plans, and the illustrations. All are worthy of the work. Here and
there, in the ground plans, we miss the arrow-head, indicating the
points of the compass, and this, we hold, should always be put in; and
if the illustrations, engraved from photographs, as we are told, are a
trifle too sharp and hard, we gain in accuracy what we lose in beauty,
and would not have it otherwise. We heartily thank Mr. Burn for his
valuable work, and his publishers for the style in which they have put
it forth; and shall be only too happy to find it in our portmanteau when
we next visit Rome.
_The Wonders of Engraving._ By GEORGES DUPLESSIS. Illustrated with Ten
Reproductions in Autotype, and Thirty-four Wood Engravings, by P.
Selher. Sampson Low, Son, and Marston.
This translation of 'Les Merveilles de la Gravure' will doubtless, in
the words of the editor, be 'acceptable to all lovers of this important
and deeply interesting branch of art. It traces from its different
origins in wood engraving and _nielli_, this effort of one high art to
become the handmaid and herald of another, until the genius of the
engraver has developed a comprehensive department of original design and
elaborate artistic work of his own. Our author has told the story of
this development as it unfolds itself in the different schools of
Italian art in Spain, in Flanders, in Holland, in Germany, England, and
France. This necessitates brief sketches of distinguished engravers in
wood or copper, belonging to all these countries, with some account of
their works. As many of these engravers are far better known to fame by
their paintings, we have fresh interesting details concerning the
life-work of Leonardo da Vinci, Marc Antonio Raimondi, Albrecht Dürer,
Rembrandt, Ruysdael, Lucas v. Leyden, Paul Potter, Hogarth, Gillray,
Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorraine, with very many others. The author
rather glories in a clever reference which he made of some anonymous
engraving of the early Italian school to the hand of Leonardo himself,
and in some interesting and independent confirmation of his guess, which
he afterwards derived from other quarters. To those who have not made
the art of engraving a practical and prolonged study, many of these
chapters may have the appearance of a catalogue of strange names, and of
partially comprehended work, rather than of a dissertation to make one
wise. The transition is rapid from one great name to another, and the
volume will be used as a book of reference rather that as a continuous
treatise. The autotype copies of several old engravings, as well as
numerous woodcuts, greatly enliven and enrich the pages. It is very
interesting to see in this department of human endeavour, how great
results have followed accidental discovery. The Italian goldsmiths, who,
before running their enamel (_nigellum_) into the ornamented and
engraved gold, tried the effect of their work by staining paper or
linen, and by the impressions (_nielli_) which the engraved surface when
first washed with colouring matter would produce, no more anticipated
the extraordinary development which their chance trials would receive,
than could the early printers have prophesied the marvels of the modern
printing-press. M. Duplessis has briefly and clearly enumerated and
described all, or nearly all, of the processes of engraving. We are
surprised that he has not given some place to the wonderful process of
lithography. The volume is a marvel of finish and beauty.
_Art in the Mountains._ By HENRY BLACKBURN. London: Sampson Low, Son,
and Marston.
Mr. Blackburn is well-known as a traveller with a special faculty; he
has an artist's eye, and his record of wanderings in Algeria, Spain,
Normandy, are pages of picture. Hence was he the very man to make a
pilgrimage into the Bavarian highlands, and bring back an intelligible
account of that strange Passion-Play performed by the peasants of
Ober-Ammergau; and excellently well he has done it. There is something
strange, something almost weird in the enactment of a mediæval
miracle-play in this nineteenth century--by peasants, too, who are some
of them before Paris by this time, obeying Bismarck's iron will.
Extremes meet in the oddest manner. As to this old-fangled
representation, which has come off once a decade for the last two
centuries, there seems to be nothing irreverent about it. They are a
child-like folk, these Bavarian peasants; they have no Prussian _geist_;
they possess a strong imitative faculty, such as belonged to the first
villagers who, in ancient Greece, originated what we now call comedy.
Mr. Blackburn's illustrations amply show what sort of people they are.
Look at the maiden at page 59, with the mild bovine eye that Homer loves
to attribute to Hebe, and the well-shapen yet utterly unlightened face,
and the comfortable, unfascinating curves of shoulder and arm, a
woman--a dull, good, unimaginative 'young person'--with no tendency
towards witchery or ladyhood. Having examined that portrait, you have no
difficulty in understanding how it is that a Passion-Play lives
alongside the railway and the telegraph. The slow-moving, cow-eyed
maiden is typical; that she would heartily and reverently enjoy the show
of our Lord's Passion is clear enough. But how long she, and such as
she, will crawl on in their snail-like groove, now that our 'own
correspondent' has appeared in Ammergau, now that the representatives of
Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate have gone together to besiege Paris,
is a question not easy to settle. Mr. Blackburn states that there will
probably be ten performances of the Passion Play in 1871, and that then
it will not be repeated till 1880. We commend anybody who really desires
to see it to go to Ammergau next year. We move fast nowadays--that
Bavarian village will be quite another sort of place in 1880.
_Church Design for Congregations: its Developments and Possibilities._
By JAMES CUBITT, Architect. With nineteen plates. Smith and Elder.
The practical divorce of Art and Utility has told nowhere more
disastrously than in the building of churches. Gothic buildings with
'long-drawn aisles and fretted roof,' designed and adapted for the
processional and ritual worship of the Romish Church, have for three
centuries been the dreary reverberating theatres of Protestant reading
and preaching. Perhaps few of us could recall a more comfortless ideal
than a rural parish church in winter, half the congregation excluded
from seeing, and the other half from hearing the monotonous reader of
prayers and sermons. Nonconformists, while rightly deeming that the
Episcopal Church had no monopoly of Gothic architecture, have not been
always wise in their appropriation of it. They have built the old Gothic
church with its nave, two aisles, transepts, and chancel, its clustered
stone pillars and clerestory, utterly unmindful of the fact that of all
styles of ecclesiastical building it was the most unsuited for their
worship and preaching. Their dignified discomfort led to the
substitution of iron columns, as incongruous, and, in artistic effect,
as ugly as anything that could be imagined--'a mediæval church,' as Mr.
Cubitt says, 'in the last stage of starvation.' If we must have nave and
aisles, as he justly remarks, we seem shut up either to bad arrangement
or bad architecture. Fame and fortune await the architect who can create
a new order of buildings for Congregational worship which shall avoid
both. Mr. Cubitt seems ambitious to attempt this, and he breaks a lance
with old conventionalism with great courage and skill. The type that is
required, he says, 'does not present itself in the ordinary nave and
aisles plan, whether its nave-piers are thick or thin; but it may be
hopefully sought in either of these two ways--'by designing our churches
without columns at all, or by designing them with substantial columns
placed where they will cause no obstruction. The former system is
already adopted in small buildings, and there are some signs of its
future employment on a larger scale. It allows great variety of form.
Its plans may be oblong, cruciform, circular, or polygonal; or still
better, a fresh combination of three different elements. On the latter
system the columns may be few in number and far apart, or they may be
placed so near the side walls as to obscure, not the seats, but only the
passages leading to them. We may thus have either the wide nave with
narrow side aisles, or the ordinary nave with very wide bays, or both
together. We may plan a grand open space before the pulpit and communion
table--surely a natural arrangement for a Protestant Church--and we
shall find ample scope for architecture in its external and internal
treatment.' The subsequent chapters are virtually a development and
illustration of these ideas. The writer advocates the admission of the
dome into Gothic architecture; he has much to say on behalf of the
Eastern mosque; and no one who has stood in the vast and simple area of
St. Sophia, at Constantinople, built, it must be remembered, as a
Christian church, could fail to have been greatly impressed with its
magnificent congregational capabilities. Galleries in theatre form, iron
column churches, lanterns, and most other things that perplex church
builders, are discussed. The merit of Mr. Cubitt's work is that it is
strictly utilitarian. It recognises the actual necessities, not only of
Congregational worship, but of Congregational church builders; it boldly
grapples with all inartistic incongruities; it avoids 'schools' and
'orders,' and honestly seeks to supply what is wanted under genuine
artistic conditions. Abundance of plates and drawings illustrate Mr.
Cubitt's theories. We heartily commend this book to all whom it may
concern, as the most independent, intelligent, and scholarly attempt in
the direction indicated that has been made.