Besides, not only is “effigies” not the correct word for sketch, but Pliny would scarcely have used it in this sense, when immediately afterwards, speaking of the sketches of Arcesilaus, which sold for more than the finished works of other artists, he employs the appropriate term for sketches,—“proplasma.” In the translation of Pliny, published by Mr. Bohn, and made by Mr. Bostick and Mr. Riley, this term is translated “models in plaster;” but it simply means sketches or antijicta, in whatever material they were made. The words “plastæ” and “plasma” have nothing to do with plaster. “Plastæ” were simply modelers, and πλαστική was the art of modeling,—the plastic art. Again, Pliny could scarcely have intended to say that Lysistratus invented modeling sketches of statues in clay before executing them in plaster, since he tells us explicitly that Pasiteles used to say that _plastice_ was the mother of _statuaria, scalptura, et cælatura_; and, though he was distinguished as first in all these arts, he never executed anything in them until he had first modeled it in clay,—“nihil unquam fecit, antequam finxit.” Before leaving this sentence, let us take a different view of its possible meaning. May not Pliny use the words “signa” and “signis” to mean pictures and not statues? Undoubtedly “signum” was thus used, as where Plautus speaks of a “signum pictum in parieti,”—a picture painted on the wall; or where Virgil speaks of a “pallam signis auroque rigentem,”—a mantle stiff with embroidered figures and gold. In this sense the passage would mean that Lysistratus made effigies from pictures as well as from statues, and that thenceforward not only no statues but no pictures were made without being copied in bas-relief, or in the round, argilla, or white clay. This would account for the use of the word “effigiem,” which has a stronger significance of reality than “imaginem.”