In his third Discourse, which was delivered on the 10th December, 1883, the President entered on his exhaustive discussion, continued in many subsequent Discourses, of "The relation of Artistic Production to the conditions of time and place under which it is evolved, and to the characteristics of the races to which it is due." In this Discourse he briefly and suggestively reviews the Art of Egypt, Assyria, and Greece, endeavouring to account for the main characteristics of each. In Egypt he shows how a nation securely established in a peace and pre-eminence lasting for ages, blessed beyond measure in a fertile and prospering climate, a nation beyond all things pious and occupied in reverential care of the dead, should give birth to an art serene, magnificent, and vast. "Those whose fortune it has been," he eloquently said, "to stand by the base of the Great Pyramid of Khoofoo, and look up at its far summit flaming in the violet sky, or to gaze on the wreck of that solemn watcher of the rising sun, the giant Sphinx of Gizeh, erect, still, after sixty centuries in the desert's slowly rising tide; or who have rested in the shade of the huge shafts which tell of the pomp and splendour of hundred-gated Thebes; must, I think, have received impressions of majesty and of enduring strength which will not fade within their memory." After old Egypt, and the account of Chaldæan and Assyrian Art, with its warlike expression, we are led on in turn to the consideration of Greek Art, and the causes of its development. "Nothing that I am aware of in the history of the human intelligence," he said, "is for a moment comparable to the dazzling swiftness of the ripening of Greek Art in the fifth century before Christ." After speaking of the fortunate balance and interaction of races which resulted in the Greek Art of that era, he goes on to speak of the exceptionally favouring circumstances of the people: "Here are no vast alluvial plains, such as those along which, in the East, whole empires surged to and fro in battle; no mighty flood of rivers, no towering mountain walls: instead, a tract of moderate size; a fretted promontory thrust out into the sea--far out, and flinging across the blue a multitude of purple isles and islets towards the Ionian, kindred, shores." Such a fortunate environment, joined to the extraordinarily high ideal formed by the Greeks of citizenship, had much to do with the fostering of Greek Art, in all "its nobility and its serenity, its exquisite balance, its searching after truth, and its thirst for the ideal." [Illustration: HEAD OF A YOUNG GIRL A STUDY IN OILS]