157. But there is another quite essential point in an eagle's head, in comprehending which, again, the skull will not help us. The skull in the human creature fails in three essential points. It is eyeless, noseless, and lipless. It fails only in an eagle in the two points of eye and lip; for an eagle has no nose worth mentioning; his beak is only a prolongation of his jaws. But he has lips very much worth mentioning, and of which his skull gives no account. One misses them much from a human skull:--"Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft,"--but from an eagle's you miss them more, for he is distinct from other birds in having with his own eagle's eye, a dog's lips, or very nearly such; an entirely fleshy and ringent mouth, bluish pink, with a perpetual grin upon it. So that if you look, not at his skull, but at him, attentively enough, you will precisely get Æschylus's notion of him, essential in the Greek mind--πτηνὸς κύων δαφοινὸς αἰετός--and then, if you want to see the use of his beak or bill, as distinguished from a dog's teeth, take a drawing from the falconry of the Middle Ages, and you will see how a piece of flesh becomes a _rag_ to him, a thing to tear up,--διαρταμήσει σώματος μέγα ῥάκος. There you have it precisely, in a falcon I got out of Mr. Coxe's favourite fourteenth century missal. Now look through your natural history books from end to end; see if you can find one drawing, with all their anatomy, which shows you either the eagle's eye, his lips, or this essential use of his beak, so as to enable you thoroughly to understand those two lines of Æschylus: then, look at this Greek eagle on a coin of Elis, R. 50, and this Pisan one, in marble, Edu. 131, and you will not doubt any more that it is better to look at the living birds, than to cut them to pieces. 158. Anatomy, then,--I will assume that you grant, for the moment, as I will assuredly prove to you eventually,--will not help us to draw the true appearances of things. But may it not add to our intelligent conception of their nature?