The chief point of interest for us lies in the execution of these statues. They embody a very sensible progress. Art has thrown off the hesitations of its first youth and attacks the stubborn material with much certainty and no little science; and yet the most striking quality is less the successful grappling with a mechanical difficulty, than the feeling for nature and the general striving for truth; a striving which has not been discouraged by the resistance of the material. This resistance has resulted in a method that makes use of wide, smooth surfaces; and yet the workmanship has a freedom that a too great fondness for superficial polish too often took away from the diorite monuments of Egypt. The bare right arm and shoulder are remarkable passages. The strongly-marked muscles of the back and the freedom with which the bony framework is shown under the flesh and skin should also be noticed. All these parts are treated with a breadth that gives a fine look of power to the otherwise short and thickset figure. And yet the vigour of the handling never goes beyond what is sober and discreet (Fig. 98). The same character is to be found in the hands, where joints, bones, and nails are studied with minute care, and in the feet, where power of foothold and the shapes of the toes are thoroughly well indicated. [Illustration: FIG. 97.--The hands of a statue; from Tello. Louvre. Drawn by Bourgoin.] The treatment of the two heads is no less excellent (Plate VII). The eyes are straight and widely opened; the heavy brows join in the middle; the strong and salient chin, as well as the crown of the head, is shaved in the fragment in which it is left bare.[211] Under the kind of hat or turban in the other there would be a head no less bald. In our own day the small cap of cotton or linen covered by the twisted scarf or shawl of the Turk or Hindoo, conceals little but the smooth skin of the skull.[212] The custom had yet to be introduced of wearing the long and closely-curled hair and beard that we find reproduced in the sculptures of Nineveh. The nose is broken in both heads, but if we may judge from the statuettes and bas-reliefs of the same epoch, especially from a curious fragment recovered in the course of the same excavations, it must have been arched--but not so much as the Assyrian noses--and a little thick at the end. Taking the face as a whole it is square in structure, like the body; in the few examples of Assyrian heads in the round that we possess the oval of the face seems longer, but the beard by which the whole of its lower part is concealed renders any comparison difficult. We do not think, however, that there is any necessity to raise a question of race. “It is only subject to the greatest reserve that we can venture to say anything as to the ethnography of the types created by sculpture, especially when those types are archaic, and therefore exposed more than all others to the