"In your progress through that mechanical part of your professional education, which is directed to the acquisition of a perfect knowledge of the human figure, I recommend to you a scrupulous exactness in imitating what is immediately before you, in order that you may acquire the habit of observing with precision every object that presents itself to your sight. Accustom yourselves to draw all the deviations of the figure, till you are as much acquainted with them as with the alphabet of your own language, and can make them with as much facility as your letters; for they are indeed the letters and alphabet of your profession, whether it be painting or sculpture. "These divisions consist of the head, with its features taken in three points of view, front, back, and profile; the neck in like manner, also the thorax, abdomen, and pelvis; thigh, knee, leg, ankle, the carpus, metacarpus, and toes; the clavicula, arm, fore-arm, wrist, carpus, metacarpus, and fingers. While you are employed on these, it would be highly proper to have before you the osteology of the part on which you are engaged, as in that consists the foundation of your pursuit. And, in this period of your studies, I recommend that your drawings be geometrical, as when you draw and study a column with its base and capital. At the same time you should not neglect to gain a few points in perspective, particularly so far as to give effect to the square and cylinder, in order to know what constitutes the vanishing point, and point of distance, in the subject you are going to draw. "After you have perfected yourselves in the parts of the figure, begin to draw the Greek figures entire, with the same attention to correctness as when you drew the divisions in your earlier lessons. Attend to the perspective according to the vanishing point opposite to your eye. You will naturally seek to possess your mind with the special character of the figure before you;--and of all the Grecian figures, I would advise you to make from the Apollo and Venus a general measurement or standard for man and woman, taking the head and its features, as the part by which you measure the divisions of those figures. "Light and shade must not be neglected; for what you effect in drawing by the contour of the figure, light and shade must effect with the projections of those parts which front you in the figure. Light and shade there produce what becomes outline to another drawing of the same object in a right angle to the place where you sit.