598 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



To the attractive hues of fruit, I believe, we must ultimately trace 

 back our whole artistic pleasure in the pure physical stimulation of 

 beautiful colors, displayed by natural objects or artificial products. 



Our present inquiry, then, will yield us some account of that primi- 

 tive delight in red, purple, orange, and yellow, which we usually take 

 for granted as an innate instinct of humanity, savage or civilized. 

 When, some few months back, we analyzed the various elements of 

 pleasure which make up our aesthetic enjoyment of a daisy, we were 

 compelled, for the time being, to leave the original bdauty of its pink- 

 and-white rays wholly unexplained. We regarded the delight in color, 

 relatively to the subject we were then examining, as an ultimate and 

 indecomposable factor in our developed consciousness. To-day, how- 

 ever, I hope we shall be able to go a little further back, and to show 

 that this delight, like all other feelings of our nature, is no mere chance 

 and meaningless accident, but the slow result of a long adaptation 

 whereby man has gradually become fitted to the high and responsible 

 station which he now occupies at the head of organic existence. 



The sole object of flowering is the production of seeds that is to 

 say, of embryo plants, destined to replace their parents, and continue 

 the life of their species to future generations. Flowers and seeds go 

 together ; every flower producing seed, and every seed springing from 

 a flower. Ferns and other like plants, which have no blossoms, bring 

 forth spores which grow into shapeless little fronds, instead of true 

 seeds containing a young plantlet. But all flowering species produce 

 some kind of genuine fruit, supplied with more or less nutriment for 

 the tender embryo in its earlier days. And this matter of nutriment is 

 so important to a right comprehension of our subject that I venture, 

 even at the imminent peril of appearing dull, to digress a little into the 

 terrible mysteries of Energy, which comprise the whole difficulty of the 

 question. 



Wherever movement is taking place in any terrestrial object, the 

 energy w 7 hich moves it has been directly or indirectly supplied from the 

 sun. In the green parts of plants, the solar rays are perpetually pro- 

 ducing a separation of carbon and ox} T gen, the former element being 

 stored up in the tissues themselves, while the latter is turned loose 

 upon the atmosphere in a free state. Whenever they recombine, 

 motion and heat will result, as we see alike in our grates, our steam- 

 engines, and our own bodies. An animal is a sort of machine viewed 

 from a purely physical standpoint in which the energetic materials 

 laid up by plants are being reconverted into the warmth which reveals 

 itself to our touch, and the evident movement which we see in its 

 limbs. The vegetable or animal substances which are capable of yield- 

 ing these energies to our bodies we know as food or nutriment. They 

 perform exactly the same part in the physical economy of men or 

 beasts as that which fuel performs in the physical economy of the 

 steam-engine. Of course, from the mental point of view, we have the 



