teriorated in many insects, through either the degraded instinct of the parent or the less fastidious appetite in the caterpillar offspring. I will append a few instances, some of which indeed will be found interesting and instructive. In the examples of the large Crecropia, Polyphemus, Prometheus, and Luna moths, as well as in a number of butterflies, it is true that the power of discernment seems to have been lost, the selections of food plants extending into various families; though even here it must be remembered that we are taking a thousand insects as a unit, there being a strong probability that any one individual parent may yet be found true to a particular botanical affinity to which its brood is intrusted, the various peculiarities being, as it were, the hereditary result of some confusion of Babel in the remote past. The Saturnia Io belies the great show of "bull's eyes" upon its wings, being blindly indiscriminate. But what do we find in the instance of the Monarch or Archippus butterfly, the protégé of the milkweeds? Its black and yellow banded caterpillar is found on all the six species of New England Asclepias if we look with sufficient patience, though chiefly upon the common silkweed. It is a faithful nursling of this lactescent tribe. On one occasion, however, I found it thriving on the dogbane, a similarly milky-juiced plant. But what is the fiat of the human botanical judges? The dogbane is not included in the milkweeds, though it immediately precedes them in the botanical sequence, and certain affinities are readily traceable between the two orders, both plants having milky sap, opposite, entire leaves, long pods, silky seeds, I have never seen this caterpillar on the closely tween these two orders. The Phaeton butterfly of Figwort family, its list of head, toad-flax, scrophulatter, with the scarlet leaves think of associating with the Scudder that this caterpillar this in truth, were it not egg that was left while the My experience has never erpillars of the Troilus. other foliage than sassaspecies of the family Launeatly folded leaf. And it also on the prickly ash, the last mentioned I can TOAD-FLAX, SNAKE HEAD, times found on a families distinctly ing each other in shows that De Canthe closest affinity beIt is not on record him the hint. is another interesting exa dual botanical mission of two natural orders (Comceae) and never going outside ing, doubtless, an hereditary rather than mixed impartiality quite commonly found upon thising a web-tent hung from the spiny it emerges at night to feed. my illustration is partial to the selections chiefly comprising the turtlelaria, moth mullein, and painted cup. The posing as blossoms, no one but an expert would other plants mentioned. But I learn from is also found on the honeysuckle: a poser that it seems a clear case of heedlessness-an butterfly was sipping the honey tubes, of course. disclosed the weird-looking eye-spotted catbutterfly, or blue swallow-tail, upon any fras and spice-wood, the only two northern racea, upon which it conceals itself in the yet I see that some collectors have found hop-tree (Ptelea), and syringa. Concerning offer no explanation, but the other two ex ceptions-both in the Rue family-have a somewhat interesting significance taken in connection with the insect next considered. The ailantus silk-worm, introduced into this country from China about twenty years ago, and now very common in certain regions, for years was not known to swerve in its allegiance to its own companion, "tree of heaven," from which it is named, and which had long been introduced here. On the basis of the facts already set forth does any one doubt that if its favorite food plant were suddenly exterminated there would be a winged stampede, as it were, to the prickly ash and the hop-tree, our only two native allies to the ailantus? But what are the singular facts? The moth, I am told by careful observers, has quite recently proved fickle to its original diet, and yet ignores the kindred plants. As a naturalized foreigner, under new conditions, it has concluded to "do as the Romans do," and out of compliment takes the lead of its closest insect ally, our Prometheus moth, the favorite selections of which are the sassafras and its relative the spice-wood, upon both of which the ailantus caterpillar is now occasionally found. There certainly seems to be some occult affinity between these two orders of plants, Lauracea and Rue, which the botanists have not discovered. Here among the Alpen peaks of our country we may learn a lesson from antiquity in the example of, if not the most beautiful, certainly in many respects the most interesting, of butterflies. Much has been written concerning this strange lover of the cold. I will quote a recent reference of Grant Allen: "On and near the summit of Mount Washington a small community of butterflies belonging to an old glacial and arctic species still lingers over a very small area where it has held its own for the 80,000 years that have elapsed since the termination of the great ice age. The actual summit of the mountain rises to a height of 6293 feet, and the butterflies do not range lower than the 5000 feet line. . . . Again, from Mount Washington to Long's Peak in Colorado the distance amounts to 1800 miles, while from the White Mountains to Hopedale in Labrador, where the same butterflies first appear, makes a bee-line of fully a thousand miles. In the intervening districts there are no insects of the same species. Hence we must conclude that a few butterflies left behind in the retreating main guard of their race on that one New Hampshire peak have gone on for thousands and thousands of years producing eggs, and growing from caterpillars into full-fledged insects without once effecting a cross with the remainder of their congeners among the snows of the Rocky Mountains or in the chilly plains of sub-arctic America. So far as they themselves know, they are the only representatives of their kind now remaining on the whole earth-left behind like SPICE-BUSH, HAZEL, APPLE, PEA. the ark on Ararat amid the helpless ruins of an antediluvian world." For 200,000 years, according to geological data, these boreal broods must have wooed the frozen seas. Driven southward by the overwhelming ice, companions of the verdant fringe of the vast glacier and following in its retreat, they were at length beguiled by remnant ice fields lodged in the great gulfs of the Presidential range, and at last stranded among the furrowed peaks. For years this butterfly-in the foreground of my Alpine design-was supposed to be confined to Mount Washington; but, as mentioned above, it has disclosed itself on other distant summits. It is also credited to Mount Monadnock, and I think revealed itself to me on the peak of Mount Lafayette, though decoying me beyond the limits of prudence, and thus defeating capture or even perfect identification. Who shall question that through the ages, as now, this mountain sprite has been true to the sedges upon which its broods are found, even as it is still alike, in the color of its wings, to the everlasting rock among which it hibernates? W. Hamilton Gibson. MASACCIO (TOMMASO DI SER GIOVANNI GUIDI). 1402-1428-9. (ITALIAN OLD MASTERS.) T is difficult to separate with absolute certainty, in the revival, or rather transformation, of art with which the name of Masaccio is connected, the part which belongs to him from that which is due to his master Masolino; for that there was a certain common quality is evident from the disputes which have arisen over the share taken by each in the works ascribed to them. There is a curious parallel between Masaccio and Raphael in this relation to their masters, in the important positions they hold in the history of art, and in their early deaths. The especial contribution of Masolino to the art of Masaccio appears to be the frank study of the nude and a direct reference to nature for the details of his figures; or, to use the words of Cavalcaselle, "he [Masolino] was equally careless of the traditional garb of time-honored scriptural figures; and his personages are dressed in vast caps and turbans, coats and tight-fitting clothes, spoiling by their overweight or inelegant cut the effect of the finely studied heads, the delicate hands and feet, which he so carefully imitated from nature." But this in general means that, possibly from a lack of ideal power, Masolino fell back on nature to an extent that before him was unknown, and by the sharpness of his innovation unsettled the authority of the artistic traditions which had from the days of Giotto largely 1 Fra Angelico did not die till thirty years after Masaccio. The date of Masolino's death is not known; but it was not much later than that of Masaccio. guided and still more largely limited the direction of art. Henceforward the tendency of the progress of art is towards the predominance of the purely artistic element over the subject-a change which, when we come to translate it in terms of modern art philosophy, is of enormous import. It means the gradual elimination of the purely devotional aim of the painter, the gradual introduction of his personality, and the study of art for art's sake. The purely ecstatic form of art was to disappear with Fra Angelico,1 who carried it to the height which always leads to reaction and neglect-a neglect partly due to the reaction and partly to the failure of his imitators to satisfy the sentiment awakened by the master. Masaccio was born in 1402. He was the son of Ser Giovanni di Simone Guidi, and at the age of nineteen was enrolled in the guild of speziali, which now would be called that of the apothecaries; the business of the speziali being to prepare the prescriptions of the physician and hypothetically to compose the colors of which the artist was to make use, as in those days the color-man did not exist. Masaccio registered in the guild of painters in 1424. His chief work was the decoration in fresco of the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of the Carmine at Florence; and its importance in the history of art may be judged from the fact that at one and the same time Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci were engaged in studying these frescos, which indeed have been the study of artists of all succeeding generations. The only other probable work of Masaccio's, and the earliest, is in a little chapel in S. Clemente at Rome, and consists of a series of frescos devoted mainly to the history of St. Catherine of Alexandria. Here one sees at once the break with the art of preceding generations. "The Crucifixion," which occupies the wall opposite the entrance, is a vast, scattered composition with a distinct impress of an effort to represent an imaginative realization of the event as it occurred. The motive is so evidently due to the naturalistic tendency of Masolino that it is not surprising that this and the other pictures in the chapel have been attributed to the master instead of to the pupil; but the technical grounds for assigning them to Masaccio are too strong to permit us to 1 The relation of Masaccio to his master Masolino is so intimate, and so much controversy exists concerning the identification of their work, that we give place to the following paragraphs from Dr. J. P. Richter's notes on Vasari (London: George Bell & Sons, 1885). Dr. Richter says of Vasari's sketch of Masolino: "The description of this great artist's long career is very short and certainly incomplete. Late researches have brought to light valuable information concerning events of Masolino's life, of which Vasari seems to have been unaware; and, what is still more important, the discovery of two extensive wall-decorations, authenticated by the artist's signature, now enable us to study closely the style of this artist's works, which have very often been confounded with those of his far-famed pupil Masaccio. "Many of the details of Masolino's life can now be proved to be unfounded, but this does not in the least invalidate the writer's general statements about the artist's career, of which he appears to us to speak with more justice than many writers on art, even at the present day, feel inclined to admit. According to the views of Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the merits of this painter would come to very little when compared with his defects. According to their theory, Masolino had no share in the execution of the celebrated wall-paintings of the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of the Carmine at Florence; and the apparent discrepancies of style, which have always been noticed by those art-students who have studied the wall-paintings in question on the spot, are to be explained as varieties of style in one and the same artist, Masaccio. Instead of producing any proofs of this somewhat vague hypothesis, they repeatedly point to the difference of Raphael's manner, when under the influence of Perugino, and when working independently. (See Italian edition, Storia della Pittura in Italia.' Firenze: 1883. Vol. II., pp. 261, 282, 292, 303.) But we may safely say that such a comparison is not to the point, inasmuch as there is no evidence to show that the quite exceptional and peculiar deviations, to which Raphael's art was subjected for some short period, are likely to have been foreshadowed in the case of Masaccio. According to Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Masolino was incapable of producing such fine and grand paintings as have heretofore borne his name, and we believe, on good grounds, supported by the testimony not only of Vasari, but also of so early a writer as Albertini in his Notes on the Statues and Pictures at Florence,' published in 1510. In this work the following passage Occurs: The [fresco-work in the] chapel of the Brancacci is half by his [Masaccio's] hand, half by the hand of Masolino, with the exception of the "Crucifixion of St. Peter," which is by Filippo [ Filippino Lippi].' And here we feel justified in saying that if the testimony of tradition in art history is worth anything, it must be in this instance. Vasari says of the famous wall-paintings in the Brancacci Chapel, that all the most celebrated throw Vasari's testimony overboard, and in the details of some of the compositions there are certain coincidences with Masaccio's work in the Brancacci Chapel which are too clear to leave much doubt that the two chapels were painted by the same artist.1 The fainting Virgin in the group at the foot of the cross, afterwards imitated by Perugino, is in distinct violation of the orthodox traditions of the Crucifixion; for it is not admitted by the Roman Catholic Church that the Virgin fainted, as she is supposed to bear the full weight of the misery that had fallen on her, while her insensibility would have been a partial and sculptors and painters since Masaccio's day 'have been studying there. He goes on to give a long list of names of such painters, including Michelangelo and other personal friends of his. (See Vol. I., p. 411.) Therefore the tradition about the authorship of that highly esteemed monument must have been uninterrupted. Again, the interest by which three generations of great painters had been led to take the fresco-paintings of the Brancacci Chapel as the best models for their own studies must have been too lively to admit of such serious blunders as the said theory would involve. However, if we were to admit for a moment that Masolino's collaboration at the Brancacci Chapel was not sufficiently evident, it would be vain to enter into a discussion upon the subject, if there were no other monuments of Masolino's style than those described by Vasari, for all the works by his hand enumerated by the biographer have perished since, with the exception of the Brancacci Chapel. Even here only two pictures can at present be identified with his descriptions. "But some forty years ago, when the whitewash was taken off the wall of the collegiate church at Castiglione d'Olona, in the province of Como, between Varese and Milan, it was found that the choir was covered by fresco paintings exhibiting the signature, Masolinvs de Florentia Pinsit.' The following subjects are here represented, the figures being nearly life-size: The Nativity of Christ,' The Annunciation,' 'The Coronation of the Virgin,' The Marriage of the Virgin,' and 'The Adoration of the Magi.' All these compositions are placed in triangles above the spectator's head. On the perpendicular walls we find representations of the 'Entombment of the Virgin.' The two large pictures at the sides have been described as representing scenes of the life of St. Laurentius; however, in the opinion of the present writer, they illustrate the life and martyrdom of St. Stephen. This church was founded in 1422 by the Cardinal Branda, of Castiglione. The date of its completion may be conjectured from the inscription on a fine high-relief on the portal giving the year 1428. The sepulchral monument of the cardinal in the choir bears the date 1443. He, no doubt, was Masolino's employer not only in Castiglione, but most probably also at Rome, as will be seen in the notes to Vasari's Life of Masaccio.' Close to the collegiate church is the small baptistery, which is entirely covered by fresco-paintings by Masolino, representing scenes from the life and martyrdom of St. John the Baptist. On the ceiling are busts of the Fathers of the Church and of prophets. Here occurs the date 1435. If these figures can be relied upon as correct (the writing is apparently of a later date, but it may only be a subsequent restoration of the original), it would follow that the pictures in the baptistery were about seven years later than the decoration of the collegiate church. A close study of these imposing and very impressive pictures enables us to state positively that the characteristics of style are here precisely the same as in the |