VIII.

In 4to, 25 Plates, price 36s.,

ON THE SCIENCE OF THOSE PROPORTIONS BY WHICH THE HUMAN HEAD AND COUNTENANCE, AS REPRESENTED IN ANCIENT GREEK ART, ARE DISTINGUISHED FROM THOSE OF ORDINARY NATURE.

(PRINTED BY PERMISSION.)

_From a Letter to the Author by Sir William Hamilton, Bart., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the Edinburgh University._

Your very elegant volume, “Science of those Proportions,” &c., is to me extremely interesting, as affording an able contribution to what is the ancient, and, I conceive, the true theory of the beautiful. But though your doctrine coincides with the one prevalent through all antiquity, it appears to me quite independent and original in you; and I esteem it the more that it stands opposed to the hundred one-sided and exclusive views prevalent in modern times.

_From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal._

We now come to another, and much more remarkable corroboration, which calls upon us to introduce to our readers one of the most valuable and original contributions that have ever been made to the Philosophy of Art, viz., Mr Hay’s work “On the Science of those Proportions,” &c. Mr Hay’s plan is simply to form a scale composed of the well-known vibrations of the monochord, which are the alphabet of music, and then to draw upon the quadrant of a circle angles _answering to these vibrations_. With the series of triangles thus obtained he combines a circle and an ellipse, the proportions of which are derived from the triangles themselves; and thus he obtains an infallible rule for the composition of the head of ideal beauty.