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Plato Profile Directory 03
Page 09
Further, our student must submit to a thorough grounding in world-geography with its physical and human sides welded firmly together. He must be able to pick out on the map the headquarters of all the more notable peoples, not merely as they are now, but also as they were at various outstanding moments of the past. His next business is to master the main facts about the natural conditions to which each people is subjected--the climate, the conformation of land and sea, the animals and plants. From here it is but a step to the economic life--the food-supply, the clothing, the dwelling-places, the principal occupations, the implements of labour. A selected list of books of travel must be consulted. No less important is it to work steadily through the show-cases of a good ethnological museum. Nor will it suffice to have surveyed the world by regions. The communications between regions--the migrations and conquests, the trading and the borrowing of customs--must be traced and accounted for. Finally, on the basis of their distribution, which the learner must chart out for himself on blank maps of the world, the chief varieties of the useful arts and appliances of man can be followed from stage to stage of their development.
From the first there was promise of a battle to the end between Goshonne and Das Lan. Goshonne well knew that if the new cult gained a firm footing he would lose his influence and at best be but a mediocre medicine-man. Das Lan, on the other hand, knew that he must break the power of such a man as Goshonne, if he was to assume the leadership. Goshonne scoffed and scorned, and would have none of the new belief. Still, he was an Indian, and the prophecies of his rival gradually filled him with superstitious fear, while his followers were either deserting him openly or were secretly joining the ranks of the enemy. Death was predicted for the members of Goshonne's own family, and well could Das Lan make such prophecies, for Goshonne's two brothers were already stricken with tuberculosis. First one died, then the other. Das Lan could now point to him and say, "That is what Kuterastan does to those who do not believe!" It was thus that Goshonne's power finally was broken and Das Lan became a seer.
The fifth chapel represents the birth of the Virgin. Having obtained permission to go inside it, I found the date 1715 cut large and deep on the back of one figure before baking, and I imagine that this date covers the whole. There is a Queen Anne feeling throughout the composition, and if we were told that the sculptor and Francis Bird, sculptor of the statue in front of St. Paul's Cathedral, had studied under the same master, we could very well believe it. The apartment in which the Virgin was born is spacious, and in striking contrast to the one in which she herself gave birth to the Redeemer. St. Anne occupies the centre of the composition, in an enormous bed; on her right there is a lady of the George Cruikshank style of beauty, and on the left an older person. Both are gesticulating and impressing upon St. Anne the enormous obligation she has just conferred upon mankind; they seem also to be imploring her not to overtax her strength, but, strange to say, they are giving her neither flowers nor anything to eat and drink. I know no other birth of the Virgin in which St. Anne wants so little keeping up.
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