This is figured
in Wolf's work on Chamonix and the Canton Valais, but a larger and
clearer reproduction of such an extraordinary work is greatly to be
desired. The small wooden statues above the triptych, as also those
above its modern companion in the south transept, are not less
admirable than the triptych itself. I know of no other like work in
wood, and have no clue whatever as to who the author can have been
beyond the fact that the work is purely German and eminently
Holbeinesque in character.
I was told of some chapels at Rarogne, five or six miles lower down
the valley than Visp. I examined them, and found they had been
stripped of their figures. The few that remained satisfied me that
we have had no loss. Above Brieg there are two other like series of
chapels. I examined the higher and more promising of the two, but
found not one single figure left. I was told by my driver that the
other series, close to the Pont Napoleon on the Simplon road, had
been also stripped of its figures, and, there being a heavy storm at
the time, have taken his word for it that this was so.
THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE {16}
Three well-known writers, Professor Max Muller, Professor Mivart,
and Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace have lately maintained that though the
theory of descent with modification accounts for the development of
all vegetable life, and of all animals lower than man, yet that man
cannot--not at least in respect of the whole of his nature--be held
to have descended from any animal lower than himself, inasmuch as
none lower than man possesses even the germs of language.
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