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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



in mingled pity and contempt. " It's only a 

 daisy ! " she says, in her native Dorsetshire 

 tongue. There is nothing more in it. Why ! 

 dear me, I had forgotten my " Peter Bell." I 

 see it now, and repent me of my bad psychology. 

 I have been asking these children to experience 

 a feeling for which they have no appropriate 

 nervous organ. I have been requesting the blind 

 to enjoy the glories of sunset, or exhorting the 

 deaf to drink in the touching strains of Men- 

 delssohn. Indeed, if the reader will believe me, 

 I don't think I would have conimitted such a 

 blunder in practical psychology except for the 

 sake of experiment, example, and precept. These 

 little maidens can receive pleasure from the pink 

 and white and yellow of the blossom ; perhaps 

 they can even appreciate the symmetrical arrange- 

 ment of disk and rays and daisy-cup ; but they 

 cannot possibly see the beauties of those tiny 

 separate specks of yellow which the educated ob- 

 server resolves into perfect individual flowers. 



How could it be otherwise ? In the individ- 

 ual and in the race appreciation of art must come 

 before appreciation of Nature. Only by connect- 

 ing the workmanship of flowers and shells and 

 insects with the workmanship of bowls and pad- 

 dles and sculptured stone, can we ever rise to a 

 love for beauty in these natural shapes. The sav- 

 age who delights in patiently- wrought clubs and 

 war-canoes can see no marvel in the delicate 

 handicraft of the ammonite, the lycopodium, or 

 the thistle-flower. Indeed, I venture myself to 

 think that our enjoyment of the beauty of design 

 in Nature — as opposed to the more sensuous grat- 

 ification of form and color — is largely due to the 

 influence of that Hebrew cosmogony which for 

 fifty generations has formed an intimate portion 

 of our every-day life. It has taught us to look 

 upon every plant or animal as made, while the 

 savage regards them merely as growing. And 

 though we may now accept a somewhat different 

 account of the origin of life, yet we cannot cast 

 away in a moment — let us hope we may never 

 cast away — the beautiful and poetical implica- 

 tions of the earlier creed. 



But these little peasant-children beside me can 

 hardly profit much by the sublime conception of 

 the Hebrew bards. They have never seen those 

 fluted pillars and diapered patterns on which the 

 taste for intricate design has been slowly built up. 

 They and their ancestors forever have formed 

 their aesthetic ideas from the glazed pottery and 

 rude furniture of the laborer's cottage. They can 

 admire a red-and-blue German print, or a pink- 

 and-white daisy viewed as a whole; but I doubt 



whether they would look twice at the deeply-re- 

 cessed Norman doorway of Iffley Church, or the 

 Prentice's Column in Roslyn Chapel. Much less, 

 then, can they transfer this feeling of admiration 

 for skill and delicacy of handicraft to the foliated 

 suture of my lias ammonite or the bell-shaped 

 florets of my dissected daisy. 



It could not have been for this, I suppose, 

 that I noticed them pulling to pieces their centau- 

 ries when I first lay down here. Probably not. 

 That was doubtless an ebullition of the natural 

 taste for destruction which we all inherit, more 

 or less, from our predatory ancestors. It was 

 not without reason that those pseudo-philoso- 

 phers, the phrenologists, assigned a separate 

 bump on their fanciful cranial chart to the fac- 

 ulty of destructiveness. The self-same impulse 

 which drove our naked forefathers to burn one 

 another's villages, entered into alliance at later 

 times with political or religious fanaticism to over- 

 throw the temples of Ephesus and Persepolis, the 

 library of Alexandria, the painted windows of our 

 own cathedrals, the H6tel-de-Ville, and the Co- 

 lonne Vendome. Iconoclasts and Puritans and 

 Communards doubtless fully believed in the jus- 

 tice of their principles, but they all felt a grim 

 pleasure, one imagines, in the destruction of idol- 

 atrous images -nd anti-social monuments. As I 

 was coming here this morning, I passed through 

 a field of stubble with a thick sprinkling of tall 

 thistle-heads. Whenever I came within reach of 

 a big one, I cut it < ff with a smart blow from my 

 stick. The thistle deserves no quarter as an en- 

 emy to the agricultural interest, and it was cer- 

 tainly very pleasant to see their heads roll off so 

 nicely at a single clean cut. 



So far we have looked at those aesthetic points 

 in our daisy which a complete examination of its 

 structure could not fail immediately to suggest. 

 But there are many others which, though not so 

 obvious to the analyst, are far more generally 

 perceived than those with which we have lately 

 dealt. We will retrace our steps to the stage 

 where we have merely considered the daisy in 

 its aspects as a colored and symmetrical object. 

 Everybody feels at once that it is a great deal more 

 than that. Let us see why. 



In the first place, it is a, flower — a real flower, 

 with all the general attributes of flowers as a 

 class. Milliners will sell you an artificial daisy 

 which really looks at first sight nearly as good as 

 the genuine article. But you and I feel that a nat- 

 ural field-grown daisy is worth a good ten thou- 

 sand of such tinsel abominations. And yet notice 

 here a curious revulsion which has been brought 



