Transactions. 65- 



The Appreciation of Beauty by Animals. 

 By Mr James Shaw, Tynron. 



The question of the origin and preservation of vegetable and 

 animal beauty is one vi^hich deserves more attention than 

 it has yet received. We are assuming, of course, that the 

 Beautiful exists, and that there is a faculty within us similar 

 to what is called " an ear for music " in the case of melody, 

 which is responsive to loveliness and prompts us to conserve 

 what is grateful to the sight. This faculty of ours is as uni- 

 versal as an instinct. The lowest savage pays tribute to 

 external beauty of colour or of form. His tattooed body, his 

 head gaudily decked with feathers, his elaborately patterned 

 weapons or articles of luxury have suggested to a great 

 modern writer that the wild man's love of ornament rather 

 than his desire of comfort has been at the origin of clothes. 



Confucuis, who lamented that personal beauty was pre- 

 ferred to virtue, only said what our preachers and moralists 

 everywhere repeat. Wordsworth says that his heart leapt 

 up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky — it did so when he 

 was a boy — it did so when he was a man, and it did so with 

 his grey hairs. 



But if beauty merely existed for man — if he were the 

 only creature for whom it had charms, then well might we 

 wonder at the prodigality of nature, which, through all times 

 and places, spreads this rich legacy, altogether heedless 

 Avhether the most gifted of her sons be present to admire or 

 not. It has been said in well-known lines : — 



" Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, 

 And waste its sweetness on the desert air." 



Yet not only in the solitudes of the tropical forest but in 

 the awful solitudes dimly pictured out by the geologist or 

 revealed betimes by the microscope, flowers, and colours, and 

 patterns of symmetry exist in all their glory, far out of 

 our reach in space or time, and accusing nature of waste or 

 prodigality if man alone is supposed conscious of her charms. 



And so we have a distinguished writer (see Reirpi of Law 



