the emotional appeal of starry space, while the 

 second carries all the thrill of a first-hand telesco- 

 pic view of those vast and nebulous reaches. 



V 



Let us now see how these general conclusions 

 apply to such as the sea-horse. In the creature occu- 

 pying my attention at the bench, I find, first of all, 

 that which must have struck every observer who 

 has studied the hippocampids to any extent, 

 though I can discover no reference to it in the rec- 

 ords, and that is the fact that the lines of the sea- 

 horse, no matter what may be the position of its 

 body or what contortions it assumes, are extremely 

 graceful and are suggestive of that one form of 

 beauty which the ancient Greeks defined as being 

 the finest and purest of all forms of linear beauty, 

 that form of beauty which was recognized long be- 

 fore classical standards were set and which has re- 

 mained unchanged throughout all the later gener- 

 ations of human thought — the form of beauty con- 

 tained in the gracile curves of a woman's torse. 



Not only do grace, symmetry, proportion en- 

 hance the appearance of the sea-horse — the virtue 

 of any single one of these qualities being sufficient 



[302] 



