276 THE FACT OF BEAUTY 



giving the flower an advertisement which attracts useful in- 

 sect visitors. 



(b) Secondly there are arrangements of lines and colours 

 which are not of direct use to their possessors, but have none 

 the less a physiological significance, being expressions of 

 rhythmic growth and orderly chemical processes. The pleas- 

 ing parallel lines on many shells express periods of growths 

 like the concentric rings inside the stem of a tree or the 

 spine of a sea-urchin. The beautiful cross-bars on a hawk's 

 feather are the expression of diurnal variations in the blood- 

 pressure at the time when the feather was amaking. The 

 subtlety of coloration is often due to its rhythmic distribu- 

 tion — its waxing and waning, its paling and flushing — so that 

 it represents very literally the ripple-marks of growth. 



(c) But, thirdly, in many cases, we cannot suggest for 

 the beauty any utility whatsoever, either direct or indirect. 

 Just as it is the way of water in certain circumstances to 

 crystallise into very beautiful and very varied snow-crystals, 

 so it is the way of individualised living matter to form the 

 exquisitely beautiful shells of Foraminifera and Radiola- 

 rians. It may be that these relatively simple animals illus- 

 trate something that may be called organic crystallisation, 

 though we shall afterwards find reason to suspect that this 

 is not all ; our present point is that their beauty is not useful. 

 Just as it is the way of particles of water in the atmosphere 

 to form a rainbow when the sun shines through, a beautiful 

 thing that has no meaning at all except to us, so the " beauty 

 for ashes " that transfigures the leaves of the forest in their 

 dying has, so far as we know, no significance whatsoever 

 to the plant. The withering leaves might as well be ugly, 

 but they are not. Whence again rises the question. Is there 

 any meaning in this pervasiveness of the beautiful? 



