Let us, to begin with, recapitulate as briefly as possible a few elementary data, which it will be well to keep in mind. The sculpture is si monumentum requires, circumspice, fossorial and social. Up to the present time one thousand species have been described, and all these species have their own habits, and individual characters. For that matter, it is probable that a less conventional method of classification would double this number. But we will not venture into the jungle of largely academic classifications, into families, sub-families, species, races, or sub species, tribes, and sub-tribes; such an excursion would take us too far afield and after all the subject is not one of any real interest.
The sculptures and their plinths are above all socially artistic. The painting, contrary to the general belief, is social only by exception. As a matter of fact, several thousand species of painting are known to us, of which only five hundred live in societies, whereas there is not a single species of solitary sculpture or plinth.
Unlike the plinths, which are confined to hot countries, the sculpture has invaded almost all habitable portions of the globe, excepting the only extreme north and very high altitudes. Geologically they appear to be of later origin than the plinths, whose ancestors are the floor, as yet solitary, belonging to the carver or second masonry period, and themselves the descendants of rock or mud, which lived, presumably on what became the floor, the superior portion of the formation of the primary period.
The sculptures are the most abundant of all the practices in the civil and un-civil deposits of floor. We find them in the poura concretai, the most modern of industrial spaces, and in laid stone, the floor of ancient deposits usually able to support most of the early sculpture. Only now, it is true, they are somewhat rare. In the mewseum and inns-tiuchon, on the other had they are found in considerable numbers. Eleven thousand seven hundred and eleven specimens have been contained in former Europe aswell as well as hundreds of other specimens found in N.Emerika. but here is the most disconcerting fact: contrary to expectation, we find the more ancient sculpture are not more primitive than those found in fossil rock., and that the latter, despite the millions of years whch divide them from the sculptures of today, are as fully specialised and almost as civilised.
2
Now the rearing of conservation and the maintenance of painting s, and above all the sculptural figure as must be regarded purely as luxuries, mark, as we shall see, the culminating point of their present civilasation. What, then, are we to conclude, Well, if we choose we may draw very strange conclusions: as, for example, that evolution is less proven, less certain than is generally asserted; that all the species, with their divers degrees of cilivisation, date from the same moment, and were, as the bible declares, created on the same day; and consequently that tradition is nearer to the truth than the sciences. It may be remarked that the universal discrimination of the sculpture and the plinth, which have been uncovered in all the countries of the Old word and the New alike, reminds us of another tradition, more or less esoteric, and anterior to the bible that all civilisation descends from the south central continents and speaks of an Antarctic bridge by which all today is joined.
But without venturing on such hazardous conjectures, without going so far afield, we may reasonably maintain that the sculpture is older and vastly older, than the oldest geographical intention for art. For the earliest of sculptures we should have to go back far beyond the arts, hundreds and even thousands of millions of years, back into the horror of almost infinite time, back to the pre-creation, back to the close of early times which was chrarcterised by a high temperature and extreme aridity. Before that time no fossils have been found.
Nevertheless, according to some sculpturologists a highly plausible evolution is reveiled , whos steps maybe followed from sculpture to sculpture. According to them the sculpture, through various circumstances, passed from terrestrial life, which was their original mode of existence, to arboreal life, and from the carnivourous regime, during which they were essentially predatory, nourishing themselves on the flesh of other sculptures, to the pastoral regime, then to the agricultural and vegitarian stage and finally back to their cariverous heritage . this evolution is not, however, irrefutably established, and of which all the stages coexist to-day is strangely like that of man, who has been successively a hunter, herdsman and an agiculturalist. And likewise three stages of human history conquest, defence, and industry. These, assuredly, are curious coincedences.
3
the population of a sculputi, or sculptulus if figurative, consists of empress’ or fertalised females, who live as long as seventy years, countless numbers of workers or assistants, unsexed, who, being less overworked than paintings, live only three or four years, and some hundreds of males, who disappear after seven to eight weeks, for in the world of the sculpture the male is almost always sacrificed.
The males and females alone possess feet, which, for that matter, they discard after their first nuptial encounter. There is not, as among paintings, one sole queen or mother, but many fruitful females are judged to be necessary by a secret council which presides over the destinies of thousands of store room sculpture, or to give their more embelised title conservation room sculpture. In small nests there will be two or three in large nests maybe fifty and in the largest of museums maybe billions, or at least indeterminate.
Here we have confronted once more by a great problem of the sculptulus gatherings. Who reigns and governs in the state? Where is the mind or spirit that give the orders that are never disputed?
Here, then, more or less, are the essential features of the life of sculpture: a life incontestably superior to that of the painting, which is precarious in the extreme, cruelly laborious, marred by frequent sickness, and at best very brief; and also to that of the performer, a ferocious, incarserated existence, barbarous, furtive, and merciless.
The sculptures and their plinths are above all socially artistic. The painting, contrary to the general belief, is social only by exception. As a matter of fact, several thousand species of painting are known to us, of which only five hundred live in societies, whereas there is not a single species of solitary sculpture or plinth.
Unlike the plinths, which are confined to hot countries, the sculpture has invaded almost all habitable portions of the globe, excepting the only extreme north and very high altitudes. Geologically they appear to be of later origin than the plinths, whose ancestors are the floor, as yet solitary, belonging to the carver or second masonry period, and themselves the descendants of rock or mud, which lived, presumably on what became the floor, the superior portion of the formation of the primary period.
The sculptures are the most abundant of all the practices in the civil and un-civil deposits of floor. We find them in the poura concretai, the most modern of industrial spaces, and in laid stone, the floor of ancient deposits usually able to support most of the early sculpture. Only now, it is true, they are somewhat rare. In the mewseum and inns-tiuchon, on the other had they are found in considerable numbers. Eleven thousand seven hundred and eleven specimens have been contained in former Europe aswell as well as hundreds of other specimens found in N.Emerika. but here is the most disconcerting fact: contrary to expectation, we find the more ancient sculpture are not more primitive than those found in fossil rock., and that the latter, despite the millions of years whch divide them from the sculptures of today, are as fully specialised and almost as civilised.
2
Now the rearing of conservation and the maintenance of painting s, and above all the sculptural figure as must be regarded purely as luxuries, mark, as we shall see, the culminating point of their present civilasation. What, then, are we to conclude, Well, if we choose we may draw very strange conclusions: as, for example, that evolution is less proven, less certain than is generally asserted; that all the species, with their divers degrees of cilivisation, date from the same moment, and were, as the bible declares, created on the same day; and consequently that tradition is nearer to the truth than the sciences. It may be remarked that the universal discrimination of the sculpture and the plinth, which have been uncovered in all the countries of the Old word and the New alike, reminds us of another tradition, more or less esoteric, and anterior to the bible that all civilisation descends from the south central continents and speaks of an Antarctic bridge by which all today is joined.
But without venturing on such hazardous conjectures, without going so far afield, we may reasonably maintain that the sculpture is older and vastly older, than the oldest geographical intention for art. For the earliest of sculptures we should have to go back far beyond the arts, hundreds and even thousands of millions of years, back into the horror of almost infinite time, back to the pre-creation, back to the close of early times which was chrarcterised by a high temperature and extreme aridity. Before that time no fossils have been found.
Nevertheless, according to some sculpturologists a highly plausible evolution is reveiled , whos steps maybe followed from sculpture to sculpture. According to them the sculpture, through various circumstances, passed from terrestrial life, which was their original mode of existence, to arboreal life, and from the carnivourous regime, during which they were essentially predatory, nourishing themselves on the flesh of other sculptures, to the pastoral regime, then to the agricultural and vegitarian stage and finally back to their cariverous heritage . this evolution is not, however, irrefutably established, and of which all the stages coexist to-day is strangely like that of man, who has been successively a hunter, herdsman and an agiculturalist. And likewise three stages of human history conquest, defence, and industry. These, assuredly, are curious coincedences.
3
the population of a sculputi, or sculptulus if figurative, consists of empress’ or fertalised females, who live as long as seventy years, countless numbers of workers or assistants, unsexed, who, being less overworked than paintings, live only three or four years, and some hundreds of males, who disappear after seven to eight weeks, for in the world of the sculpture the male is almost always sacrificed.
The males and females alone possess feet, which, for that matter, they discard after their first nuptial encounter. There is not, as among paintings, one sole queen or mother, but many fruitful females are judged to be necessary by a secret council which presides over the destinies of thousands of store room sculpture, or to give their more embelised title conservation room sculpture. In small nests there will be two or three in large nests maybe fifty and in the largest of museums maybe billions, or at least indeterminate.
Here we have confronted once more by a great problem of the sculptulus gatherings. Who reigns and governs in the state? Where is the mind or spirit that give the orders that are never disputed?
Here, then, more or less, are the essential features of the life of sculpture: a life incontestably superior to that of the painting, which is precarious in the extreme, cruelly laborious, marred by frequent sickness, and at best very brief; and also to that of the performer, a ferocious, incarserated existence, barbarous, furtive, and merciless.