has been produced by insects; and so toadstools have risen into oaks. At least we have never had any other theory of their beauty propounded by evolutionists. Again, some animals perhaps choose their mates by their beauty (of which there is very little proof); and therefore all do; and therefore beauty has been constantly increasing, from oysters, octopuses, and gorillas, up to whatever creatures you think the most beautiful, by spontaneous generation and mutual admiration; and the beauty of the human race has been steadily on the increase from the ancient Greeks through all stages of civilisation and improvement up to the modern Irishman. That kind of logic is queer enough when applied to living or reproducing things. But it is still queerer to say that because all these advances have taken place through "natural selection," or some other process or phrase, therefore we must take another leap in the dark and believe that all the beauties of entirely inanimate nature have developed themselves by some yet unnamed process without any assistance from any more intelligent or personal First Cause than Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Parent of all, Persistent Force," in no particular direction, gradually subdividing itself into innumerable streams of peculiar forces, and spontaneously converting a homogeneous nebula of universally dispersed matter into all the present varieties, by what he calls "unfathomable mysteries.

By way of introduction to further reasoning on the subject, I cannot do better than quote again the same words of Dr. Mozley's sermon on "Nature," which I did in the chapter on it in my own little book above named. He says: "Nature is beautiful by the selfsame materials and laws that it is useful. Take a gorgeous sunset. What is the substance of it? Only a combination of atmospheric laws. of light and heat; the same laws by which we live and see and breathe. Who could have told beforehand that these physical laws which fed us, clothed us, gave us breath and motion, the use of our organs, and all the means of life, would also create a picture ? If any one should say that mere habit and custom have produced our admiration of what we call beautiful sunsets, let us substitute another phenomenon of light, so rare that many persons never see one in their lives, and yet so beautiful that those who see it for the first time, are amazed at its magnificence, especially if it happens to be such a brilliant specimen as that which appeared here in October 1870: I mean the aurora borealis.

I do not know that the evolutionists have really made that or any other answer to that argument of Mozley's; and yet

that cannot be because they are ignorant of either it or him: he was far too great a writer for that. Moreover, they occasionally show themselves ready enough to swoop down on writers of far less theological celebrity than Mozley, who has been called "the modern Butler," when they see a chance of making capital out of it by exposing some real mistake..

The

If one

Perhaps you might not unreasonably say to me, "Why need you trouble yourself to prove an undefended case? Darwins, Spencers, Huxleys, Tyndalls, Hæckels, et id genus omne, have practically confessed the beauty of nature to be too much for them, by leaving it to explain itself, with a few insignificant illustrations about insects and flowers. It will be time enough to reply to them when they have answered Mozley and your former remarks." In one sense that is all true. But leaving alone does not propagate truth. side is left to go on preaching its own dogmas and keeping discreet silence about objections which they cannot answer, and if the objectors keep silence too, the objections will be forgotten, or assumed to have been silenced, though nobody undertakes to say how, or when, or by whom. Therefore, in short, it does not answer to abstain from repeating the objections to bad theories merely because the theorists abstain from noticing them, as most of this class of theorists do when it suits them; or coolly say that their theory is getting universally accepted.

I have not only looked at the most likely books, but I have asked greater readers than myself, including some with an inclination rather against than in favour of my views, whether they could tell me of any automatic theory of general beauty beyond those oft-repeated ones about flowers and animals, and I have asked in vain.

Let us consider then some specimens-for they can only be specimens-out of an innumerable multitude of natural beauties, which it is impossible to account for by any theory except the simple one that they were designed by some mind which had also the power to produce them, whatever means it worked by. We may be quite ignorant of the means, but quite certain that some means were intelligently used: as certain as we are that the most inexplicable conjuring-tricks are contrived by more intelligence in that matter than we possess ourselves; indeed, the less we can guess at the means of performing them the more we think of the cleverness of their inventors. The only answer that I have ever been able to obtain privately to questions of this kind is the one I. alluded to before, and which is worth further notice because the person who gave it me was as capable as any in the world

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of giving the best answer that any such question admits of, being one of the most eminent philosophical writers of the age, and not a mere inventor of phrases intended to pass for philosophy with half-educated people who pronounce them 'greater than Newton," and their periodicals print such rubbish for them. Probably they could not answer a single question out of Newton in an examination. The answer I got was this that beauty is merely a question of habit and fashion, and that there is no such thing as absolute beauty, and therefore nature has done nothing for it. That is only another specimen of the common fallacy of that school in these matters, of generalising from a very small or special set of instances, which is directly contrary to the great law of scientific induction. We can afford to admit that our ideas of artificial beauty, such as we try to make for ourselves, are very much matters of transitory fashion, though even that requires some qualification. I need only utter the word "dress," to bring to your minds the very idea of mutability rather than of beauty; and you will need no reminder that we are considering the beauty of nature, and that dress is not natural. Nor is any artificial adornment of the person, or the cultivation of any particular kind of figure, in which one nation, or the people of one age, may admire just the contrary of another, and call that a beauty which some other nation pronounces a monstrosity. But, setting aside mere dress as an ornament, in which change (with some regard to use and convenience) has long been regarded more than abstract beauty in all the modern nations, I do not think it is true that the taste of civilised nations about the cultivation of what is comprehensively called figure has materially varied in any known period, and still less about beauty of face, which admits less of artificial cultivation. We need not consider purely barbarian tastes, which sometimes extend to absolute mutilation, as of Chinese ladies' feet, and the production of hideous deformities of face and figure by still more barbarous and unprogressive nations.

Most young men and women now would accept it as the highest compliment to be told that they resemble some famous Greek or Roman bust in face, and even in their hair, of which the style for women is necessarily, in some degree, artificial, and therefore variable. If some of the old Roman hairdressing is not copied by modern ladies and their "artists" in that line, it is certainly not because it is not beautiful, but either from ignorance how to do it, or from the vile modern habit of allowing French hetaire to invent their fashions, and perhaps from a bold desire of advanced female thinkers to display their contempt for St. Paul's and other antiquated

prejudices in favour of long hair over "touzled fringes," or an imitation of boys, or some of the other ugly vagaries which come into fashion for a little while and then die out and never revive; which is probably the best test to apply to any doubtful fashion as a matter of real beauty.

The same cannot be said of the constant admiration of what has always been understood by the common phrase, "a good figure," or "a fine shape," as it used to be called in the novels of the last century, and its consequent cultivation by various exercises and still more artificial means. Those who have occasionally seen the controversial articles and letters in sundry periodicals in favour and in derision of the Rational Dress-Reformers (we must take care to put the hyphen in the right place) will have read, or may know independently, that the very same kind of epithets and descriptions were applied to the figures of female beauties and their cultivation by the oldest Greek and Roman poets and other writers, and by the mediæval and later ones, and by satirists and philosophers of the "rational dress" order, for nearly 1000 years up to the present day, and that the fashions they denounce have only varied in intensity from time to time. Notwithstanding such variations, and in spite of both satirists and philosophers in

all ages, I suppose one could not find in all literature any

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admiration expressed of what everybody now understands by the common phrase a bad figure.' It matters nothing for this purpose whether those who denounce or those who advocate artificial means of improving it are right. Some of the strongest denouncers avow themselves admirers of the very same result when they believe it to be natural; and others lament that their scolding produces no effect beyond apparently intensifying the fashion they revile by evoking contradictions said to be grounded on experience as to health, however contrary to theory and à priori probabilities.

All this goes to prove that there has been no material variation in the estimate of beauty of either face or figure in the civilised nations of the world in any known period, and that when people talk of the proverbial mutability of taste and fashion, it really means taste and fashion in purely artificial things, like dress and furniture, and not in those which are chiefly made for us by nature; and it is the beauty of nature that we are talking of throughout.

Therefore it is hardly necessary to consider also the variety of tastes in building, which again is purely artificial. Yet even in that we may trace more uniformity in taste in the long run than some people imagine. It does not follow that because only one style used generally to be in fashion in one

age and nation, all those old ones are 'not more or less beautiful. Most likely all the styles which are possible within the laws of mechanics and geometry have been exhausted, except mere monstrosities. And what is the consequence? Why, that we now recognise the beauty of them all, and do our best to imitate them, some persons preferring one and some another, either for different purposes or the same. A man would now be thought a fool who built a dwelling-house to imitate a Greek temple, as they did in all the Georgian period; and yet an equal fool to pronounce Greek temples ugly. Two centuries ago, and less, writers who knew no better wrote of all the great medieval styles, which are collectively called Gothic, as "obsolete" and "modern" and contemptible, just because the renaissance of the classical styles was then in fashion. But the natural instincts of mankind returned upon them, and before the end of the last century they began to see that mere ignorance had led those writers to condemn what they only did not understand. Moreover, religious prejudices had much to do with it. In all northern Europe, though not in Italy, where the classic St. Peter's had been built with the "indulgences" which caused the Reformation, the style of the old abbeys was associated with Popery against Protestantism. By degrees that delusion vanished, and then people began to see that both the great styles of architecture have peculiar beauties of their own, against which all that can be said is that they refuse to mix. At least, all the attempts of architects a few years ago to make an eclectic style out of classical and Gothic were miserable failures, though all the five Gothic styles mix well enough, as nearly every cathedral tells us. It is much like the case of animals which will not breed outside of their own species, but will freely within it. I have said more than I need to answer the only attempt that I have ever been able to meet, with from any of the deniers of design in nature to account for the enormous preponderance of beauty over ugliness that prevails throughout nature, and even in things that are partly, if not wholly, artificial. It is plain that there are permanent or continually reviving instinctive tastes for beauty, which no argument can prove to be either right or wrong, but no temporary craze of fashion can get rid of or prevent from returning. Moreover, some of our tastes for beauty may be called latent, and ready to start into action whenever the proper object is presented to them by some law of nature which has never before had the opportunity of acting, so far as we can tell, but does act, the moment it is wanted, as promptly as gravity, which never sleeps, as the old saying is. I have already mentioned the