Trumantia Resource Directory 10
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The brothers Maris have made a distinct impression on modern Dutch art, and, strange enough, each in a different way from the others. James Maris (1837-) studied at Paris, and is remarkable for fine, vigorous views of canals, towns, and landscapes. He is broad in handling, rather bleak in coloring, and excels in fine luminous skies and voyaging clouds. Matthew Maris (1835-), Parisian trained like his brother, lives in London, where little is seen of his work. He paints for himself and his friends, and is rather melancholy and mystical in his art. He is a recorder of visions and dreams rather than the substantial things of the earth, but always with richness of color and a fine decorative feeling. Willem Maris (1839-), sometimes called the "Silvery Maris," is a portrayer of cattle and landscape in warm sunlight and haze with a charm of color and tone often suggestive of Corot. Jongkind (1819-1891) stands by himself, Mesdag (1831-) is a fine painter of marines and sea-shores, and Mauve (1838-1888), a cattle and sheep painter, with nice sentiment and tonality, whose renown is just now somewhat disproportionate to his artistic ability. In addition there are Kever, Poggenbeek, Bastert, Baur, Breitner, Witsen, Haverman, Weissenbruch.

Except in the pairing time, the old males usually live by themselves. The old females and the immature males, on the other hand, are often met with in twos and threes; and the former occasionally have young with them, though the pregnant females usually separate themselves, and sometimes remain apart after they have given birth to their offspring. The young Orangs seem to remain unusually long under their mother's protection, probably in consequence of their slow growth. While climbing the mother always carries her young against her bosom, the young holding on by the mother's hair. At what time of life the Orang-Utan becomes capable of propagation, and how long the females go with young is unknown, but it is probable that they are not adult until they arrive at ten or fifteen years of age. A female which lived for five years at Batavia had not attained one-third the height of the wild females. It is probable that, after reaching adult years, they go on growing, though slowly, and that they live to forty or fifty years. The Dyaks tell of old Orangs which have not only lost all their teeth, but which find it so troublesome to climb that they maintain themselves on windfalls and juicy herbage.

That there is a close likeness between all these bodies is obvious from the fact that when any of them is strongly heated, or allowed to putrefy, it gives off the same sort of disagreeable smell; and careful chemical analysis has shown that they are, in fact, all composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, combined in very nearly the same proportions. Indeed, charcoal, which is impure carbon, might be obtained by strongly heating either a handful of corn, or a piece of fowl's flesh, in a vessel from which the air is excluded so as to keep the corn or the flesh from burning. And if the vessel were a still, so that the products of this destructive distillation, as it is called, could be condensed and collected, we should find water and ammonia, in some shape or other, in the receiver. Now ammonia is a compound of the elementary bodies, nitrogen and hydrogen; therefore both nitrogen and hydrogen must have been contained in the bodies from which it is derived.

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