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difficulty of copying the tone of the original. The drawing may be 

 equally good, the colour imperceptibly different, but the same mellow 

 snnlight shines not in the picture and in the patch ; the atmosphere 

 differs in the two ; the tone is not preserved. 



I bring forward this to show how sensitive we are to the veiy nicest 

 distinctions in tone. 



Now, in landscape scenery, provision is made for the perfect 

 preservation of tone by the distance of the source from whence the 

 light proceeds, so that although the tone may be entirely changed many 

 times in a single day, as at sunrise, noon, sunset, or in a storm or 

 shower, still the tone of the whole scene, at any instant, is perfectly 

 harmonious. 



Portions of trophical or polar scenes would be discordant if they 

 could be inti'oduced into a landscape in a temperate region. Yet they 

 are at unity with themselves. I remember, on one occasion, observing 

 the colour of the eastern part of the Red Sea, it was a palpable ultra- 

 marine, yet such was the hue of the mountains of Arabia on the 

 opposite shore, that the intense blue of the sea was in perfect keeping. 

 Could that blue be transferred to the water in one of our Westmoreland 

 lakes, the result would be monstrous. 



Thus far we ai*e following in a beaten track, but I am not aware 

 that the accurate preservation of tone in the colours of all natural 

 objects has been so frequently the subject of remark. Yet, if we take 

 any production of nature that is complete in itself, we shall, I think, 

 find its colours so adjusted as to be perfectly harmonious. 



In birds, from the gaudy parrot to the wren, we shall not meet with 

 an instance in which the colours are otherwise assorted. We find 

 an almost infinite variety of combinations of tints, and unless some 

 very definite principles had been observed in their disposition, we 

 should have had numberless examples of ill-matched colours, and want ot 

 unity in tone. A very slight alteration would be sufficient to produce 

 a manifest incongruity. 



Take, for example, the common house sparrow, with his plumage of 

 brown, black, and grey : let the grey be changed to the grey or dun 

 that prevails in the pigeon tribe ; the combination would be disagree- 

 able, and the tone of the whole destroyed. The plumage of birds 

 affords few examples of combinations of tints more exquisitely balanced 

 than the mottled browns and buffs on the back of a snipe or a wood- 

 cock. In the latter bird many of the adjacent feathers are nearly of 

 a cedar pencil colour. The jay bus feathers of a very similar hue, but 

 let some of these feathers from a jay be placed on the back of the 

 snipe or the woodcock, the combination is false and disagreeable. 



