48

LECTURES ON LANDSCAPE.

I.

OUTLINE.

1. In my inaugural lecture,[1] I stated that while holding this
professorship I should direct you, in your practical exercises,
chiefly to natural history and landscape. And having in the course of
the past year laid the foundational elements of art sufficiently
before you, I will invite you, now, to enter on real work with me; and
accordingly I propose during this and the following term to give you
what practical leading I can in elementary study of landscape, and of
a branch of natural history which will form a kind of center for all
the rest--Ichthyology.

[Footnote 1: "Lectures on Art, 1870," Sec. 23.]

In the outset I must shortly state to you the position which landscape
painting and animal painting hold towards the higher branches of art.

2. Landscape painting is the thoughtful and passionate representation
of the physical conditions appointed for human existence. It imitates
the aspects, and records the phenomena, of the visible things which
are dangerous or beneficial to men; and displays the human methods of
dealing with these, and of enjoying them or suffering from them, which
are either exemplary or deserving of sympathetic contemplation. Animal
painting investigates the laws of greater and less nobility of
character in organic form, as comparative anatomy examines those of
greater and less development in organic structure; and the function
of animal painting is to bring into notice the minor and unthought of
conditions of power or beauty, as that of physiology is to ascertain
the minor conditions of adaptation.

3. Questions as to the purpose of arrangements or the use of the
organs of an animal are, however, no less within the province of the
painter than of the physiologist, and are indeed more likely to
commend themselves to you through drawing than dissection. For as you
dissect an animal you generally assume its form to be necessary and
only examine how it is constructed; but in drawing the outer form
itself attentively you are led necessarily to consider the mode of
life for which it is disposed, and therefore to be struck by any
awkwardness or apparent uselessness in its parts. After sketching one
day several heads of birds it became a vital matter of interest to me
to know the use of the bony process on the head of the hornbill; but
on asking a great physiologist, I found that it appeared to him an
absurd question, and was certainl