Diversions of a NaturalistLankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
History
Diversions of a Naturalist
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Natural history
e, f, Human faces painted on Cretan jars across the whole width of the
neck, the design being derived from the octopus with detached eyes as
in Fig. a. Such designs survive long after their origin is forgotten,
as (according to M. Houssay) the legend of the barnacle and the goose
survived two thousand years after the Mykenæan drawings assimilating
one to the other had been forgotten.]
The solution is as follows: The Mykenæan population of the islands of
Cyprus and Crete, in the period 800 to 1000 years before Christ, were
great makers of pottery, and painted large earthernware basins and
vases with a variety of decorative representations of marine life, of
fishes, butterflies, birds, and trees. Some of these are to be seen in
the British Museum at Bloomsbury, where I examined them a few years
ago. Others have been figured by the well-known archæologists, MM.
Perrot and Chipiez, in the sixth volume of their work, "L'Ossuaire de
Crète." M. Perrot consulted M. Houssay, in his capacity of zoologist,
in regard to these Mykenæan drawings, which bear, as M. Houssay states,
the evidence of having been designed _after nature_ by one who knew
the things in life, although they are not slavishly "copied" from
nature. These early Mykenæan painters on pottery were members of a
community who worshipped the great mother--"Nature"--as Astarte or
Aphrodite risen from the foam of the sea. Being sailors and fishermen,
marine life was even more familiar to them than that of the land, and
they placed little models of sea animals as votive offerings in the
temples of the great mother, and also honoured her in decorating their
pottery with marine creatures. The little fish, Hippocampus, called
the sea-horse, the sea-urchin, the octopus, the argonaut and its
floating cradle, the sea-anemone, and the butterfly-like Pteropod,
were subjects used by these artists for which they found terrestrial
counterparts. The sea-horse was convertible decoratively into a true
horse, with intermediate phases imagined by the artists; the sea-urchin
into a hedgehog, the sea-anemone into a flower, and the Pteropod into
a true butterfly. These artists loved to exercise a little fancy and
ingenuity. By gradual reduction in the number and size of outstanding
parts--a common rule in the artistic "schematizing" or "conventional
simplification" of natural form--they converted the octopus and the
argonaut, with their eight arms, into a bull's head with a pair of
spiral horns (Fig. 14). In the same spirit it seems that they observed
and drew the barnacle floating on timber or thrown up after a storm
on their shores. They detected a resemblance in the marking of its
shells to the plumage of a goose, whilst in the curvature of its stalk
they saw a resemblance to the long neck of the bird. The barnacle's
jointed plumose legs or cirri and other details suggested points of
agreement with the feathers of the bird. They brought the barnacle and
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