Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 110 pages of information about Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891.

Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 110 pages of information about Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891.
and intensity that may have forever fled when in later years the imagination is less enthusiastic and the pulses slower.  I am sure there are many young sculptors now wanting commissions who have been trained at the academy, and better still, in the best French schools.  I maintain that the contemporary French school of sculpture is in its line equal to any school of sculpture that has ever existed, not excepting that of Phidias or that of the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  I believe history will confirm this.  Why not give these men an opportunity, and help on the movement to found a truly English school of sculpture, rather than give all such work to trading firms of carvers, who will do you any number of superficial feet, properly priced and scheduled, and in the bills of quantities, of any style you please, from prehistoric to Victorian Gothic?  Of course, this is our British way of founding a great school.

There is one method of treatment that appeals to me very strongly, and that is the application of colored metals to marble, more especially bronze and copper.  I may quote as a successful example near the Wellington Memorial at St. Paul’s.  Another suggestion—­although it is not used in combination with marble, but it nevertheless suggests what might be done in the way of bronze panels—­that is, the Fawcett Memorial, by Gilbert, in the west chapel at Westminster Abbey.

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THE ST. LAWRENCE HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE.

The St. Lawrence State Hospital at Ogdensburg, N.Y., is a center of public, professional, philanthropic, and legislative interest.  Though projected in advance of the adoption of the system of State care for the insane, it was opened at a time to make it come under close observation in relation to the question of State care, and the friends of this departure from the inefficient, often almost barbarous provisions of county house confinement could have no better example to point the excellence of their theories than this new and progressively planned State hospital.  The members of the State Lunacy Commission and Miss Schuyler and her colleagues of the State Charities Aid Society, who fought the State care bills through the Legislature this winter and in 1890, would be repaid for all of their trouble by contrasting the condition of the inmates of the St. Lawrence State Hospital with the state they were in under their former custodians, the county officers of the northern New York counties.  At the best, even when these officials realized the responsibility of their charge and were actuated by humane impulses, the county houses offered no chance of remedial treatment.  Custody and maintenance, the former mainly a reliance on force, the later often of scant provision, were the sum total of what was deemed necessary for the lunatics.  In their new environment they find everything as different

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Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.