contained in the Oval and in the Elliptic Curves. 5 



curl charm us as the whole will on the human head. We owe 

 to construction and combination all our pleasurable feelings of 

 beauty : no person is allured by a single feature of any species 

 of objects: but a thousand, or a million, arouses our anxious 

 notice. Thus, the last diagram of the eUiptic stem and the 

 foliage upon it, exhibited, by the continuity of curved lines, 

 the greatest approach to beauty, of all the figures presented to 

 the notice of the audience. 



These preliminary designs opened the way for richer combi- 

 nations ; but the subject affording such an immense field of 

 variety, I confined myself to the narrowest limits, and to one 

 oval disk of seven inches transverse diameter, from which seven 

 different designs were shown on paper. The first had a variety 

 of serpentine lines placed at random, all produced by the disk 

 of the oval just named, and the confluent lines of two such> 

 placed side by side, or end to end. Fig, 12 ; which oval disk 



was put upon the lines to prove the construction. These fines, 

 without expressing or forming any sort of figure, exhibit a set 

 of elegant curves, of varied quantities of convex and concave, 

 with which our eye will be more pleased than any set of right 

 lines similarly distributed, as in Fig. 13, which follows. 



