60 PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 
the scientific aspect of our pursuits. But there is this other 
view which commends itself both to their taste and their prac- 
tice, for they are all students, and very earnest students too, of 
the beautiful. For what is the attention given to the ceaseless 
changes and varieties of dress, to the choice and harmony of 
its colours, to the selection of ornaments, to the internal decora- 
tions of rooms and of houses, to the shapes and textures and 
hues of furniture, to the arrangements of flowers and of gardens, 
but the application of the mind-powers to this branch _of 
knowledge ? . What is taste but the appreciation of the beautiful, 
and the power of realising it? The true way towards the reali- 
sation of the beautiful in art of all sorts, including the decorative 
arts, must be through the close study and exact following of 
nature; and as the arts of design advance, it must happen that - 
these exquisite patterns of nature which microscopes unfold will 
give to students their best examples ; and asall ladies are more or 
less artists in design, there are good hopes that in the scientific 
future of our race, the microscope may be habitually employed by 
the fair students of domestic decorative arts when devising new 
patterns for their fingers to execute. The painter’s eye in all the 
more extended scenes of nature—in the greater and smaller groups 
of natural objects—sees and appreciates the beautiful or the pic- 
turesque ; and the student of the microscope, examining with his 
powerful lenses the smallest particle of their greater masses which 
the artist fixes in colours, discovers at every step lower and lower— 
deeper and deeperas he is enabled to descend towards the invisible 
—that there is the same consummate fitness and perfect beauty. | 
‘What the poet sings of suns and moons and planets and stars, 
when gazing up at those worlds of light, can be said when looking 
downwards at those smallest created things, even into what may 
be superficially considered as the refuse and waste of creation, that 
by their silent beauty they are for ever telling “The Hand that 
made us is Divine.’ In thanking the Hartley Council on behalf 
of our society for the kind way in which they immediately granted 
our application for the use of this building this eyening, may I 
allude to a proposal which will be submitted to the microscopical 
society at their next meeting, that a class be formed in which the 
use of the microscope would be explained and taught and practi- 
cally illustrated by one or more of the members; and if so, the 
permission of the council would again be asked to hold the classes 
here. This would show, especially to ladies, who are apt to over- 
rate the difficulties in the attainment of science, that there are 
fewer difficulties than they imagine in the attaining dexterity in 
the use of the microscope and in mounting the various objects, 
and that there is no branch of science which is more within reach. 
A thorough good microscope, fit for all such purposes, can now be 
obtained for five guineas, and the objects for examination can be 
found everywhere—in every leaf, in every flower, in the pond, in 
the tank, the sea-side stones, in eyery living object, in every 
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