16 THE STUDY OF ANIMAL LIFE CHAP, i 



fishes and all manner of aquatic animals ; the lobster 

 darting backwards with a powerful tail-stroke across the 

 pool ; the butterflies flitting like sunbeams among the 

 flowers. But are not all the delights of form and colour 

 and movement expressed in the songs of the birds in 

 spring ? 



It seems necessary to admit that this beauty is in one 

 sense a relative quality, varying with the surroundings 

 and education, and even ancestral history, of those who 

 appreciate it. A flower which seems beautiful to a bee 

 may be unattractive to a bird, a bird may choose her 

 mate for qualities by no means winsome to human eyes, 

 and a dog may howl painfully at our sweet music. We 

 call the apple-blossom and the butterfly's wings beauti- 

 ful, partly because the rays of light, borne from them to 

 our eyes, cause a pleasantly harmonious activity in our 

 brains, partly because this awakens reminiscences of 

 past pleasant experiences, partly for subtler reasons. 

 Still, all healthy organisms are harmonious in form, and 

 seldom if ever are their colours out of tone with their 

 surroundings or with each other, a fact which suggests 

 the truth of the Platonic conception that a living creature 

 is harmonious because it is possessed by a single soul, 

 the realisation of a single idea. 



The plants which seem to many eyes to have least 

 beauty are those which have been deformed or discoloured 

 by cultivation, or taken altogether out of their natural 

 setting ; the only ugly animals are the products of 

 domestication and human interference on the one hand, 

 or of disease on the other ; and the ugliest things are 

 what may be called the excretions of civilisation, which 

 are certainly not beauty for ashes, but productions by 

 which the hues and colours of nature have been destroyed 

 or smothered, where the natural harmony has been 

 forcibly put out of tune in short, where a vicious taste 

 has insisted on becoming inventive. 



