to this truth, and in each the scholar may find these successive
stages of development.

In the age of Phidias the art of sculpture reached its maturity.
No race and no people have ever surpassed the consummate
achievements of that period. But this perfection was the result of
a process of evolution. There had been graduated steps, and those
same steps must to-day be taken in the education of the artist.
Art had passed into its second period before authentic Greek
history began. The first stage was shown in that nation so justly
called the "Mother of Arts and Sciences." In Egypt we find
probably the first real manifestations of mind in art forms. They
are colossal exhibitions of energy, such as the Temple of Thebes,
seven hundred feet in length, statues seventy feet tall, monuments
rearing their heads almost five hundred feet in air.

"Those temples, palaces, and piles stupendous
Of which the very ruins are tremendous."

To Assyria we turn in our search for the next step in the progress
of art. Here we find the artists making melodramatic efforts to
attract the attention and fascinate the mind with weird and
incongruous shapes of mongrel brutes and hydraheaded monsters.

Finding art at this point, the Greeks, true to their race
instinct, at once began to evolve from it higher forms. They soon
awoke to the perception that beauty itself is the true principle
of fascination. Reducing their new theory to practise, the Greek
artists turned their attention to perfecting the details of the
art they had borrowed. To works originally repellant from their