Only the mother filled me with emotion, so perfect is her attitude, so real her gesture; but in her face and in that of her children there is no true reflection of the awful event taking place. There is no physiological correspondence in the pose of the limbs and between the muscles of the body and those of the face. There is insufficient accuracy in the sculpture of the heads, for in them is lacking the expression of intense emotion, of horror, fear, and pain which would inevitably be present in the terrible moment of so cruel a butchery. Even though the convulsions and spasms had altered the beauty of the lines to which the eye of the Greeks was accustomed, it was yet the duty of the artist faithfully to represent reality. Nor can it be said that the artist feared to fall into the grotesque, because certain postures of the children are so violent, that in their boldness they perhaps exaggerate the truth. Though Praxiteles himself were the creator of the Niobean group, I yet hold that a humble physiologist, looking with dispassionate eye at these statues, may affirm that they fall short of the fame of so great a master, because the faces are not so modelled as to produce the desired effect, because nature is not faithfully copied, and because there lacks the sublime ideality of terror aroused by the chastisement of an offended deity, which was the subject of the work. It was in the schools of Asia Minor, after the time of Alexander, in Pergamos and Rhodes, that antique art, before it became extinct, developed its greatest splendour, showing an irresistible tendency to the representation of pain. It is to the school of Rhodes that the Laocoon group belongs. So much has been written about this celebrated work, that I should have nothing to add if the face of Laocoon were anatomically correct. Duchenne de Boulogne was the first to notice the defects of the Laocoon of Rome, and to declare that the furrows of the brow in this celebrated statue are physiologically impossible. The eye of the superficial observer does not notice this defect, because the movement of the eyebrows which produces the fundamental line of pain is marvellously modelled. Some perhaps will say that it is useless to stop to criticise the delineation of a few furrows when such an intense and majestic pain is written on the face, when one seems to hear the sigh of superhuman agony from his lips, and sees the lines of beauty and of pain so wonderfully blended.