abuses only have anything to apprehend from the widest spread of sound education.

Medal representing the statue of Pertinax, drawn by four elephants, in a triumphal chariot after his death, by command of Severus, to the Circus, at the commencement of the games. The medal at the head of this chapter represents a similar honour which was paid to Augustus, by command of Tiberius.

**The above medal, and several of the preceding ones, are copied from the work to which we have so often referred"Gisberti Cuperi, De Elephantis in Nummis obviis Exercitationes duæ," Two Essays on the Representations of Elephants on Coins, consisting of 284 folio columns, first printed in the "Novus Thesaurus Antiquitatum Romanorum," of A. H. de Sallengre. 3 vols. fol. Hague, 1719.

ABOUT four centuries before the period when it became the fashion of Rome to drag the elephant from the forests of Ethiopia, to be tormented for the gratification of an ignorant populace, the people of Greece had demanded, probably, even a more extensive destruction of the herds of Asia and Africa, to administer to the splendour of their national religion. During the

administration of Pericles (B.C. 445), the genius of Phidias, the greatest sculptor of antiquity, conceived the daring idea of constructing statues of the gods of Greece which should unite the opposite qualities of colossal dimensions, and materials of comparative minuteness of parts. The sculpture of Greece had been gradually developing itself, through several ages, from the primitive use of the commonest woods as a material, to the employment of those of a rarer growth, such as ebony and cedar,-in clay, in marble, in metals, (and those occasionally of the most precious kinds,)-till it at length reached, according to the taste of antiquity, the highest point of perfection, in the combination, upon a great scale, of ivory and gold. Independently, indeed, of the delicate texture of ivory, its pleasing colour, and its capacity for the highest polish, there was something wonderfully stimulating to the imagination to consider that the colossal objects of the popular worship, which in their forms alone might well command the most profound reverence,―uniting, as they did, all the characteristics of the lovely, the majestic, and the terrible, in the idea of a superior intelligence-that even a single one of these great works of art had required for its completion the slaughter of hundreds of mighty beasts in distant regions. The subject is altogether so curious and interesting, that we may not be considered as deviating from our plan of associating natural history with the social history of the human race, if we dwell at some length upon what has been called the chrys-elephantine statuary (the union of gold and ivory) of the Greeks and Romans. The details of this art have been collected together in a work of uncommon splendour and learning, the labour of thirty years, devoted almost entirely to its consideration, by M. Quatremère de

Quincy, a member of the Institute of France * Out of the immense mass of materials, chiefly, which he has collected in illustration of this subject, we shall endeavour to form a concise view of a branch of ancient art, which, more than any other, had formerly escaped the attention of the learned.

In the gradual progress of Grecian sculpture, through some centuries preceding the age of Pericles, the ordinary products of the country-earth, and stone, and wood,-had formed the materials in which the genius of its art was successively developed.. Heyne has well observed, that a certain degree of perfection in sculpture would never have been reached, if the art had not commenced in the employment of common substances †. The same learned authority, speaking of the use of ivory, states that throughout Homer's Iliad the substance is but once mentioned; and that notice occurs in the description of the bit of a horse's bridle belonging to a Trojan. But in the Odyssey, the palace of Menelaus, after his return from his voyages in Egypt and Phoenicia, is enriched with ornaments of gold, and amber, and ivory. From this time, it is probable, that an increasing commerce in ivory was carried on between the Greeks and Phonicians, who could obtain abundant supplies through their intercourse with Egypt and Ethiopiat. Ezekiel, addressing the merchants of Tyre says, "the

*Le Jupiter Olympien, ou, l'Art de la Sculpture Antique, considéré sous un nouveau point de vue : ouvrage qui comprend, un essai sur le gout de la Sculpture Polychrome, l'analyse explicative de la Toreutique, et l'histoire de la statuaire en or et ivoire, chez les Grecs, et les Romains, avec la restitution des principaux monumens de cet art, et la démonstration pratique ou le renouvellement de ces procédés méchaniques. Paris, 1815. Folio. † Winkelmann, Histoire de l'Art, tom. i. addition, B.

See Heeren on the policy and commerce of the people of antiquity, section 1. chap. iv. We refer to the French translation.

men of Dedan were thy merchants: many isles were the merchandize of thy hand. They brought thee for a present, horns of ivory and ebony From the period of the Trojan war, the Greeks appear to have employed ivory in the ornaments of their arms and their furniture, in tablets, and, at a later period, in statuary of ordinary dimensions. About two hundred years after the epoch generally assigned as that of the Trojan war, we see the commercial enterprises of King Solomon introducing the same luxurious material into Judea. "Once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks †;" and, thus supplied with the elephants' teeth of India, "the King made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it with the best gold ." A century after Solomon, the sacred historian speaks of "the ivory house of King Ahab," as a thing so remarkable as to be enumerated in the book of Chronicles with all the cities that he built. "The ivory house of Ahab," and "the ivory palaces" mentioned in the forty-fifth Psalm, doubtless referred to buildings of which ivory constituted a distinguished ornament. Propertius has retained the same mode of expression in a later age. We thus see that the use of ivory, which was probably very general amongst the great monarchies of Asia, had extended into Greece and Judea, several centuries before the age of Phidias.

But the employment of ivory in sculpture in the manifold variety of bas-relief and statuary, and above all of colossal statuary, must have constituted a much higher exercise of human ingenuity than its application to the art of inlaying (the marqueterie of the French), of which we find the earliest mention. *Chap. xxvii. ver. 15.

1st. Kings, chap. x. ver. 22.

Ibid. ver. 18.