Dioscorides, ’tis true, in this renowned performance did but copy Polycletus, whose Doryphorus (as is commonly agreed) was the best rule of human proportions[30]. But, though a copyist, Dioscorides escaped a fault which his master fell into. For the pedestal, over which the Diomedes of Polycletus leans, is contrary to the most common rules of perspective; its cornices, which should be parallel, forming two different lines. I wonder at Perrault’s omitting to make objections against the ancient gems. I mean not to do any thing derogatory to the author, when I trace some of his particular observations to their source. The food prescribed to the young wrestlers, in the remoter times of Greece, is mentioned by Pausanias[31]. But if the author alluded to the passage which I have in view, why does he talk in general of milk-food, when Pausanias particularly mentions soft cheese? Dromeus of Stymphilos, we learn there, first introduced flesh meat. My researches, concerning their mysterious art of changing blue eyes to black ones, have not succeeded to my wish. I find it mentioned but once, and that only by the bye by Dioscorides[32]. The author, by clearing up this art, might perhaps have thrown a greater lustre over his treatise, than by producing his new method of statuary. He had it in his power to fix the eyes of the Newtons and Algarotti’s, on a problem worth their attention, and to engage the fair sex, by a discovery so advantageous to their charms, especially in Germany, where, contrary to Greece, large, fine, blue eyes are more frequently met with than black ones. There was a time when the fashion required to be green eyed: _Et si bel oeil vert & riant & clair:_ Le Sire de Coucy, chans. But I do not know whether art had any share in their colouring. And as to the small-pox, Hippocrates might be quoted, if grammatical disquisitions suited my purpose. However, I think, no effects of the small-pox on a face can be so much the reverse of beauty, as that defect which the Athenians were reproachfully charged with, viz. a buttock as pitiful as their face was perfect[33]. Indeed Nature, in so scantily supplying those parts, seemed to derogate as much from the Athenian beauty, as, by her lavishness, from that of the Indian Enotocets, whose ears, we are told, were large enough to serve them for pillows. As for opportunities to study the nudities, our times, I think, afford as advantageous ones as the Gymnasies of the ancients. ’Tis the fault of our artists to make no use of that[34] proposed to the Parisian artists, viz. to walk, during the summer season, along the Seine, in order to have a full view of the naked parts, from the sixth to the fiftieth year. ’Tis perhaps to Michael Angelo’s frequenting such opportunities that we owe his celebrated Carton of the Pisan war[35], where the soldiers bathing in a river, at the sound of a trumpet leap out of the water, and make haste to huddle on their cloaths.