aurora borealis as a perfectly new phenomenon to many people, and indeed always new the first time they see it, and much too rare to admit of the explanation that admiration of it is an inherited taste.

Another not so grand, but a still newer, phenomenon is the beautiful coloured spectra of electrical discharges through a tube almost vacuous, or filled with certain rare gases. Nobody in the world had seen that, or anything at all like it, until it appeared of itself as soon as the requisite conditions took place a few years ago; and yet nobody in the world would pronounce it anything but beautiful. So are many of the phenomena of polarised light, which are also quite modern, and are yet as unknown to the common run of men as those electrical discharges are. Not only those occasional exhibitions, but some constant ones, are equally surprises to those who see them for the first time, and had never been seen by the civilised world till quite lately. Such are, or rather were, those magnificent terraces in New Zealand, which were destroyed by an earthquake almost as soon as they had been introduced to general notice by Mr. Froude's "Oceana." In short, if the theory of beauty being only what we have learnt by long habit to think so were true, we should admire nothing that is very different from what we are used to. Some people indeed are stupid enough to think à priori that they never will; but very few indeed are so stupid as to withhold their admiration when they see a really beautiful object, entirely different from anything they have seen or imagined before. It is old tastes that are depraved by fashion and prejudices, not new ones; and the power of appreciating any real beauty that we have never seen before is latent and as ready to start into action the moment a proper object is presented to it as a needle is to jump up to a magnet, though it may never have been within miles of one before, and to turn towards a particular spot on the earth, thousands of miles away, the moment it has been stroked with a magnet and set free.

The same remarks apply to an infinite number of non-living objects which the most audacious theory-monger cannot pretend to have been modified by any non-creative agency. Such are natural water in all its forms-stormy or still seas, in sunshine and under clouds, waterfalls, rivers, brooks and lakes in the bottom of a valley, and the valley itself; mountains and hills, and all the green things upon earth; dews and frosts, ice and snow, and what are called frost-ferns on glass windows; "iridescent films" of very thin plates; polished marbles and fine woods, of which the beauty is latent till it is so brought out, and then it appears in endless variety.

And how came that endless variety? It is hard enough for us to invent a little that is beautiful every now and then, and very seldom without some great defect or mistake. What we call Nature makes no mistakes, and yet is always producing novelties, and never by any accident repeats anything exactly. It is idle, and for scientific men absurd, to talk about chance doing these things, for science knows that there is no such thing; and the more it talks about the immutable uniformity of laws of nature, the more it declares that what we call chance is only the result of some of those very laws, of which perhaps we know nothing. Set the cleverest artist to draw a thousand of the most varied patterns he can of the leaves of any tree, or indeed of any other thing, and you will soon be sick of their monotony. Yet his, according to the "persistent force" and evolutionary philosophers, is the highest intelligence in the universe, and "nature's" artistic work is only the result of laws of absolute uniformity. Which ought to be the most full of variety and "life" on their theory? And which is?

I might logically stop here, and say to the evolutionist, "Your theory, your only theory, that pretends to explain the beauty of nature by explaining it away and calling it conventional, is done for, even if you had far more evidence than you have of natural selection, or any of your other inventions, to account for the beauty of living or reproducing objects.' For, after all the complicated and portentous definitions of natural life, I think a capacity for reproduction is practically the best, though we can easily imagine once-produced creatures that might exhibit all the usual phenomena of life except that, and except mortality too, theoretically. I mean generically, not individually—such as mules, or other barren individuals of a species.

But I will not shrink from facing the automatic philosophers on the ground where they are a little stronger than they are with reference to non-living objects, and from inquiring how far their selection and survival theories can carry them towards accounting for the immense preponderance of beauty over ugliness in the world. One very large and immeasurable class of living objects-viz., trees of all kinds--we may sweep off at once with the remark that the evolutionists do not even pretend to have invented any theory to explain why all trees should not be as ugly as toadstools. And we must add that it is by no means an even chance whether things should be ugly or beautiful, though those are as opposite words as yes and no, or black and white. For everybody who has ever tried to produce anything beautiful, even in his own opinion, or has watched the attempts of other people, knows how difficult it

is, and that there can be no greater delusion than to fancy that you can produce beauty by merely making something opposite in all its features to something else which you know to be ugly. The useful or the strong can be produced by scientific invention and adequate knowledge of the laws of nature. No knowledge and no rules of science or art have ever been able to produce the beautiful, if they are able to keep designers from very gross defects or blunders.

If that is so, it follows that even if beauty did not so vastly preponderate over ugliness in nature, yet any considerable quantity of it would be a phenomenon requiring explanation. No talking about the laws of chance would do anything for it, even if chance can be admitted as a scientific cause of any phenomenon. The once-popular toy called the kaleidoscope, which was invented by Sir David Brewster, a great optical philosopher, presents an infinite number of pretty figures as you turn it round, which are made only by a good many coloured bits of glass or stones tumbled about promiscuously, and so you might call them all beautiful pictures produced by chance. But until design and contrivance were brought in, and the machine made what it was by a pair of reflecting glasses set at the proper angle, there was no beauty at all. It was the glasses that produced the pretty radiating and symmetrical figures out of each confused little heap formed by chance. Chance very seldom produces beauty without the intervention of something that lifts the arrangement above that of chance. Mere heaps of stones which have been broken and thrown together by some natural convulsion have no beauty; as, for instance, at Ilkley, in Wharfedale. That is just the converse or opposite of the composition of stones and marbles and crystals and vegetables, by what we may call the constructive laws of nature as opposed to destruction. The former almost always produce beauty; the latter very seldom do.

In like manner decaying substances are generally ugly and nasty, until some reconstructive process has set in which is going to produce new life. I know that the living creatures which are often the first products of decay are generally nasty enough looking things too, and so are some of the fungi, but they never last long. Moreover, I by no means say that beauty is universal, even among things which have ample merits of their own, such as oysters, to whom unknown ages of natural selection and admiration by man have been unable to impart anything that their greatest admirers can call beauty externally. What I do say is that the enormous quantity of natural beauty in the world is wholly inexplicable by any

theory except that of a designing power, able first to design what is beautiful (which we can very seldom and very little), and then able to produce it in such profusion that it looks spontaneous, and far more natural than ugliness, because it is so common, and in quite infinite variety.

I have said all that I need about the universal beauty and unlimited variety in trees of all kinds, for which the evolutionists have never yet pretended to invent an explanation. And I have said all that need be said of coloured flowers. If anybody likes to consider the insect theory sufficient to account for them, let him. They are so small a portion of creation that they are not worth arguing about. If that theory is right, and adequate to account for the infinity of beautiful shapes as well as colours in flowers, it wants another theory to explain how the insectal taste for floral beauty came to agree so well with human. Perhaps we and the flies had a common ancestor, and inherit our taste for beauty from him, whoever he may have been. Nor is the insectal theory much helped by the fact that bees of all kinds cultivate flowers of a multitude of kinds and colours, including some with the very minimum of colour, such as mignonette, and have not yet been able to impart any more of it to them. If it is said that the insects are attracted by nice smells, I reply that the vast preponderance of nice smells over nasty ones in nature, and of nasty smells over nice ones in art, is an additional difficulty for the automatic creationists.

Leaving that small section of creation then, with that small attempt of the evolutionists to account for it on automatic principles, I will say a few words on another kind of life, for the usual beauty of which their explanation is more plausible, but yet very far from sufficient-viz., that of animals. The effects of judicious selection in breeding are undeniable when that selection is made by some agent with adequate intelligence and experience. And so we can breed new varieties of flowers and improve fruits, whether insects do or not, beyond what is ordained for them by their instincts or their experience, which depends upon the laws of their creation. So it is not unnatural to conclude, but it is very difficult to prove, that animals select their mates according to their beauty. According to their strength, there is evidence enough that they do, and in fact must, whenever there is a superfluity in whichever is the stronger sex (which is not quite always the male sex). And, so far as strength and beauty go together, the result will be that the beauties get the best of it. Very likely also, the beauties of the weaker sex, on the whole, get the best of it. But they do so less than one would expect,

even among the human animals, in which we recognise far greater differences of beauty than we do among beasts and birds. Indeed, so little does this prevail that it is very difficult to say that it has improved the beauty of mankind in any known period. It is true that civilised men and women are, on the average, much handsomer than savages; but it is a great deal too uncertain that the civilised and handsome races have risen from savages, and ugly ones, to build any conclusion on that as a fact. All our experience is that savages die out when they come in contact with the superior races; and, I believe, absolutely none that they improve. The experience of all the known history of mankind, including the supposed oldest skeletons, exhibits very much less than one would expect in the way of improvement in beauty by natural selection or survival of the best, seeing how quickly careful breeding does produce its effects in animals. In some respects there is no longer any doubt that both we and the French have reached and passed our climax physically, and I suspect, intellectually too; for learning is not genius, which is becoming rarer in every direction. Yet our circumstances, and condition, and means of cultivating beauty had certainly increased, until a few years ago, at any rate, before universal poverty set in among the classes most likely to do the best for themselves in breeding.

This absence of evidence of general improvement in human beauty within the longest known period is still more awkward, because men are evidently more likely than beasts to avail themselves of opportunities for judicious selection. And again I say of them, as of the flower theory, that if the evidence were a hundred times better than it is, it would do absolutely nothing towards accounting for the infinity of beauty of everything with no life as high as that of locomotive animals; for locomotion is evidently a necessary element in selection, and some low animals are not locomotive. Another awkward fact is that the beasts most like us are, nevertheless, by general consent the ugliest. If, on the other hand, it is contended that apes have a standard of beauty of their own, and choose their mates accordingly, as savages probably have, then it follows that we must dismiss all animals from this discussion, and of course insects with them, and treat each species as having its own taste. And then I am afraid we shall be driven to ask how it is that an undoubted majority of every nation with our known taste is rather ugly than handsome? In any case it is an odd result of the theory of improvement by natural selection, that our nearest neighbours, the apes, and ourselves present the largest