is in India, among the readers of newspapers, quite an insatiable craving for these morsels of official gossip, it would be extremely prejudicial to the circulation of a newspaper if they no longer appeared in its columns. The vengeance of Lord Lytton and the Press Commissioner has already fallen upon one journal. The Calcutta Statesman, having poured ridicule on this Press Commissioner, has been deprived of his ministrations. In brief, the Press Commissionership is simply an agency for bribing the English Press, which costs the Indian taxpayer the sum annually of £5000. But the most effective check on the arbitrary authority of the GovernorGeneral is furnished by his Council. These are selected as men of long Indian experience, in order to aid the Governor-General with their advice and special knowledge. The last Governor-General who set at nought the advice and remonstrances of his Council was Lord Auckland, when he plunged into the disastrous war in Afghanistan. Lord Lytton, who in other respects has so carefully trod in the footsteps of his predecessor, did not fail to imitate him in this. His frontier policy was carried out in spite of the opposition of the three most experienced members of his Council; his repeal of the Cotton Duties in the face of their unanimous opposition, with the single exception of Sir John Strachey. Thus it is that, under Lord Lytton, British rule in India has become a tawdry and fantastic system of personal rule. It might perhaps do well enough if an Empire could be governed by means of ceremonies, speeches, and elegantly written despatches-" fables in prose," they might very fitly be called. an Empire cannot be so governed, and the result of the experiment has been an amount of human suffering appalling to contemplate. The Indian air is " full of farewells for the dying and mournings for the dead," and the path of the Government can be traced in broken pledges and dead men's bones. These bones are as dragon's teeth, which Lord Lytton is sowing broadcast all over India and Afghanistan, and they will assuredly be changed into armed men if the hand of the sower be not promptly stayed.

But

"Nothing," writes Sir Alexander Arbuthnot, one of the Indian Members of Council, "would have induced me to have been a party to the imposition of restrictions on the press, if I could have foreseen that within a year of the passing of the Vernacular Press Act the Government of India would be embarked on a course which, in my opinion, is as unwise and ill-timed as it is destructive of the reputation for justice upon which the prestige and political supremacy of the British Government in India so greatly depend. And here I must remark that the slight value which in some influential quarters is now attached to the popularity of our rule with our native subjects, has for some time past struck me as a source of grave political danger. The British Empire in India was not established by a policy of ignoring popular sentiment, ant of stigmatizing all views and opinions which are opposed to certain favourite theories, as the views and opinions of foolish people. Nor will our rule be long maintained if such a policy is per

sisted in."

ROBERT D. OSBORN.

ON THE UTILITY TO FLOWERS OF THEIR

BEAUTY.

THE

HE question which I propose to consider in this paper is how far the beauty of blossoms can be accounted for by the utility of this beauty to the plant producing them. It is manifestly only one particular case of a larger inquiry whether the beauty which Nature exhibits can be accounted for by its utility.

These questions connect themselves with some of the highest points of the philosophy of the universe. Is the system of the universe intellectual, or is it purely material? Is there an ordering mind, or is there merely blind and struggling matter? Are there final causes as well as material causes, or are there material causes only?

These questions have been asked and answered in opposite senses, from the first dawn of philosophy to the present hour; and during all that period of time the battle has been raging-and has spread, too, over the whole realm of Nature. Scarcely any branch of natural science exists which has not furnished materials for at least a skirmish; so that it requires an experienced and impartial eye to be able rightly to understand the true fortunes of the contest over the whole field of battle. True it is, that for every man the question between the two theories has to be decided by somewhat simpler considerations than any such survey. Something in every man seems inevitably to determine. him towards either the intellectual or the material theory of things.

The existence of beauty in the world is a very remarkable fact. On the theory of a Divine and beneficent Creator, this fact has seemed no difficulty; but the theory of a mere blind fermentation of matter gives no account of it, except as a mere accident, which, on the doctrine of chances, should be perhaps a very the existence of beauty has from theistic believers.

al accident. Hence urite theme of the

the Lord of them

is," says the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, speaking of the works of Nature," for the first Author of beauty hath created them.... for by the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionably the Maker of them is seen."* The same familiar view has lately been presented by the Duke of Argyll in his "Reign of Law":†

"It would be to doubt the evidence of our senses and of our reason, or else to assume hypotheses of which there is no proof whatever, if we were to doubt that mere ornament, mere variety, are as much an end and aim in the workshop of Nature as they are known to be in the workshop of the goldsmith and the jeweller. Why should they not? The love and desire of these is universal in the mind of man. It is seen not more distinctly in the highest forms of civilized art than in the habits of the rudest savage, who covers with elaborate carving the handle of his war-club or the prow of his canoe. Is it likely that this universal aim and purpose of the mind of man should be wholly without relation to the aims and purposes of his Creator? He that formed the eye to see beauty, shall He not see it? He that gave the human hand its cunning to work for beauty, shall His hand never work for it? How, then, shall we account for all the beauty of the world-for the careful provision made for it where it is only the secondary object, not the first?"

But even if beauty be always associated with utility and have in fact been brought about by its utility, it may nevertheless have been an object in the mind of a Divine artificer, who may have been minded to use the one as a means and end to the other. We may therefore, I think, approach the subject with a perfect freedom from any theological bias.

The whole subject will, I believe, be felt by some persons to be a piece of moonshine,-the whole discussion fit for cloudland, not for this practical solid world of ours.

Beauty, such persons would say, is not a real thing, an objective fact: it is a part of man, not of the world-it is in him who sees, not in the thing seen it is seen by one man in one thing-by another man in another.

To this it seems a sufficient answer to say that the relation of any one external thing to any one mind which produces the peculiar condition which we call the perception of beauty, is a fact, and, like every other single fact, must have an adequate cause. But when we find that there are forms of beauty, such as the beauty of sunlight, which operate alike on all men, and, it would seem, on all sensitive beingswhen we find that the brilliant flowers which attract the child in the field or the lady in the drawing-room, attract the insect tribes-we feel ourselves in the presence of a great body of persistent relations, which it is impossible to pass over as unreal or as unimportant.

But, again, there is ugliness in the world; and, one ugly thing, it is suggested, destroys all your deductions from beauty. This, no doubt, is a very important fact for any one to grapple with who proposes to give any theoretical explanation of the presence of beauty in the universe; but for me, who am only inquiring whether and how far beauty is useful, it is not really material, because there can be no doubt * Wisdom, xiii. 3-5.

+ P. 200.

that beauty, as well as ugliness, exists in the world. This much I will say in passing, that, to my mind, the balance of things is in favour of beauty and against ugliness-the tendency is in favour of beauty, not ugliness, and that tendency may be a very important thing to think of. Furthermore, the fact that we recognize ugliness seems to make our recognition of beauty more important; for it shows that the perception of beauty is not mere habit, and that we have an inward and independent judgment on the matter-we are able to approve the one thing on the score of beauty, and to reject the other as ugly.

Even allowing fully for the existence of ugliness, it must be conceded that the world around us presents a vast mass of beauty-complex, diverse, commingled, and not easily admitting of analysis. It is common alike to the organic and the inorganic realms of Nature. The pageants of the sky at morning, noon, and night, the forms of the trees, the beauty of the flowers, the glory of the hills, the awful sublimity of the stars-these, and a thousand things in Nature, fill the soul with a sense of beauty, which the art neither of the poet, nor of the philosopher, nor of the painter can come near to depict. We are moved and overcome, sometimes by this object of beauty, sometimes by that, but yet more by the complex mass of glory of the universe.

"For Nature beats in perfect tune,

And rounds with rhyme her every rune;
Whether she work on land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,

Or dip thy paddle in the lake,

But it carves the bow of beauty there,

And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."

As yet no attempt has been made to show the utility of this promiscuous and multitudinous crowd of beauties-and it seems not likely that such an attempt can yet be made with sucoess: and the phenomena of Nature are therefore likely for a long time to come to impress most men with the sense of beauty for beauty's sake. But in respect of certain particular and separable instances, the attempt has recently been made to show that the beauty exhibited is useful to the structure exhibiting it, and consequently that it may be accounted for by the strictly utilitarian principle of the survival of the fittest,-one instance in which this has been most notably attempted being in respect of the beauty of flowers. Let us consider how far beauty can thus be accounted for in this particular case.

There will be a great advantage in this course; for beauty is a thing about which it is not very easy to argue: it is too subtle, too evanescent, too disputable, to afford an easy material for the logical or scientific crucible; and these difficulties we shall best surmount by in the first place isolating certain beautiful things for our consideration, and limiting to them our inquiry into how far each of the rival theories is sufficient to explain their existence. We shall thus try to narrow the great controversy to very definite and distinct issues.

"Flowers," says Mr. Darwin,* "rank amongst the most beautiful productions of Nature, and they have become, through natural selection, beautiful, or rather conspicuous in contrast with the greenness of the leaves, that they might be easily observed and visited by insects, so that their fertilization might be favoured. I have come to this conclusion, from finding it an invariable rule that when a flower is fertilized by the wind it never has a gaily-coloured corolla. Again, several plants habitually produce two kinds of flowers: one kind open and coloured, so as to attract insects; the other closed and not coloured, destitute of nectar, and never visited by insects. We may safely conclude that, if insects had never existed on the face of the earth, the vegetation would not have been decked with beautiful flowers, but would have produced only such poor flowers as are now borne by our firs, oaks, nut and ash trees, by the grasses, by spinach, docks, and nettles."

No one can doubt who watches a meadow on a summer's day that insects are attracted by the scent and the colours of the flowers. The whole field is busy with their jubilant hum. These little creatures have the same sense of beauty that we have. What room there is for thought in that fact ! There is a subtle bond of mental union between ourselves and the creatures whom we so often despise. There is a joy widespread and multiplied beyond our highest calculation. What a deadly blow to that egotism of man which thinks of all beauty as made for him alone!

But I return to the argument. We have presented to our notice three kinds of attraction which operate upon insects-the conspicuousness of colour and form, the beauty of the smell, and the pleasant taste of the honey. No one, as I have said, who watches a meadow or a garden on a summer's day can for a moment doubt the operation of these causes, or question the direct action of insects in producing the fertilization of flowers. In that sense the beauty of a flower is clearly of direct use to the flower which exhibits it. It is better for it that it should be fertilized by insects than not fertilized at all; but is it better for it to be fertilized by insects than by the wind, or by some other agency, if such exist?

This shall be the subject of inquiry. But before we can answer it, we must go a little afield and collect some other of the facts of the

case.

The conclusion that beauty is useful for the fertilization of the flower does not rest merely on the general phenomena of a summer meadow. It is confirmed by many other observations. Flowers are not merely attractive in themselves; they are frequently rendered attractive by their grouping. Sometimes flowers individually small are gathered into heads, or spikes, or bunches, or umbels, and so produce a more conspicuous effect than would result from a more equal distribution of the flowers; sometimes yet more minute flowers or florets are gathered together into what appears a single flower, and often have the outer florets so modified both in shape and colour as to produce the general effect of one very brilliant blossom, as in the daisy or the marigold.

* "Origin of Species" (4th Ed.), p. 239.