Comparative Anatomy, or Bone-us New Conscripts Filling Up the Skeletons of the Old Regiments

A coloured etching — hand-tinted in the Regency manner — crowds the plate with grim comedy: a diminutive Napoleon, exaggerated in posture and self-importance, faces a turbaned Ottoman or allied figure while behind them raw French conscripts literally inhabit the skeletal remains of depleted regiments. The caption's punning Latin — Comparative Anatomy — frames the joke: new flesh stuffed into old bones, France cannibalizing its own youth after catastrophic losses in Russia and Spain. Cruikshank inherits Gillray's ferocious line and Rowlandson's crowd energy — the etched political print that taught readers to read compressed visual narrative, irony, and sequential implication: the direct ancestor of the comic page.