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Replagegos Omnifurian Directory 06
Page 07
It was probably during this time that he introduced the various changes into the organization of the Roman army which are usually attributed to him. Notwithstanding the sternness and severity with which he punished the least breach of discipline, he was a favorite with his new soldiers, who learned to place implicit confidence in their general, and were delighted with the strict impartiality with which he visited the offenses of the officers as well as of the privates. As the enemy still continued in Spain, Marius was elected Consul a third time for the year B.C. 103, and also a fourth time for the following year, with Q. Lutatius Catulus as his colleague. It was in this year (B.C. 102) that the long-expected barbarians arrived. The Cimbri, who had returned from Spain, united their forces with the Teutones. Marius first took up his position in a fortified camp upon the Rhone, probably in the vicinity of the modern Arles; and as the entrance of the river was nearly blocked up by mud and sand, he employed his soldiers in digging a canal from the Rhone to the Mediterranean, that he might the more easily obtain his supplies from the sea.
Reynolds was well-grounded in Venetian color, Bolognese composition, Parmese light-and-shade, and paid them the homage of assimilation; but if Gainsborough (1727-1788) had such school knowledge he positively disregarded it. He disliked all conventionalities and formulas. With a natural taste for form and color, and with a large decorative sense, he went directly to nature, and took from her the materials which he fashioned into art after his own peculiar manner. His celebrated Blue Boy was his protest against the conventional rule of Reynolds that a composition should be warm in color and light. All through his work we meet with departures from academic ways. By dint of native force and grace he made rules unto himself. Some of them were not entirely successful, and in drawing he might have profited by school training; but he was of a peculiar poetic temperament, with a dash of melancholy about him, and preferred to work in his own way. In portraiture his color was rather cold; in landscape much warmer. His brush-work was as odd as himself, but usually effective, and his accessories in figure-painting were little more than decorative after-thoughts. Both in portraiture and landscape he was one of the most original and most English of all the English painters--a man not yet entirely appreciated, though from the first ranked among the foremost in English art.
Almost never do we find a device in nature which occurs once only. The unique hardly exists: nature is a great copyist. At least two animals of wholly unlike kinds are all but sure to hit independently upon the self-same mechanism. So it is not surprising to learn that a cat-fish has invented an exactly similar mode of carrying its young to that adopted by the Surinam toad: only, here it is on the under surface, not the upper one, that the spawn is plastered. The eggs of this cat-fish, whose scientific name is Aspredo, are pressed into the skin below the body, and so borne about by the mother till they hatch. This is the second instance of which I spoke above, where the female fish herself assumes the care of her offspring, instead of leaving it entirely to her excellent partner.
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