Beauty 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



66 



unity such as all men of taste have learned 

 to admire in those three Grecian orders 

 from which the ingenuity of Rome was con- 

 tent to borrow, when it professed to invent 

 in the masculine Doric, the chaste and 

 graceful Ionic, the exquisitely elegant Co- 

 rinthian; and yet the unassisted eye fails 

 to discover the finer evidences of this unity: 

 it would seem as if the adorable Architect 

 had brought it out in secret with reference 

 to the Divine idea alone. The artist who 

 sculptured the cherry-stone consigned it to 

 a cabinet, and placed a microscope beside 

 it; the microscopic beauty of these ancient 

 fish was consigned to the twilight depths of 

 a primeval ocean. There is a feeling which 

 at times grows upon the painter and the 

 statuary, as if the perception and love of 

 the beautiful had been sublimed into a kind 

 of moral sense. Art comes to be pursued 

 for its own sake; the exquisite conception 

 in the mind, or the elegant and elaborate 

 model, becomes all in all to the worker, and 

 the dread of criticism or the appetite of 

 praise almost nothing. And thus, through 

 the influence of a power somewhat akin to 

 conscience, but whose province is not the 

 just and the good, but the fair, the refined, 

 the exquisite, have works prosecuted in soli- 

 tude, and never intended for the world, 

 been found fraught with loveliness. MIL- 

 LER Old Red Sandstone, ch. 5, p. 88. (G. & 

 L., 1851.) 



328. 



Tyrannous Demand 



for Perfection Urges Artist On All Tends 

 to an Ideal. Sir Thomas Lawrence, when 

 finishing, with the most consummate care, 

 a picture intended for a semibarbarous, for- 

 eign court, was asked why he took so much 

 pains with a piece destined, perhaps, never 

 to come under the eye of a connoisseur. " I 

 cannot help it," he replied; " I do the best 

 I can, unable, through a tyrant feeling that 

 will not brook offense, to do anything less." 

 It would be perhaps overbold to attribute 

 any such overmastering feeling to the Cre- 

 ator; yet certain it is, that among his crea- 

 tures well-nigh all approximations towards 

 perfection, in the province in which it ex- 

 patiates, owe their origin to it, and that 

 Deity in all his works is his own rule. 

 MILLER Old Red Sandstone, ch. 5, p. 88. 

 (G. & L., 1851.) 



329. BEAUTY DEFIES DEFINITION 



The concept of beauty is exceedingly dim- 

 cult. The effort to construct the notion of 

 beauty always terminates in a logical chaos 

 that bewilders me. FISCHER Aesthetik. 

 (Translated for Scientific Side-Lights.) 



330. BEAUTY EMBOWERED AMID IN- 

 HOSPITABLE MOUNTAINS Transparency 

 of Mountain Lake. This " gem of the 

 Sierra " [Lake Tahoe] is situated at an ele- 

 vation of 6,200 feet above the sea and is en- 

 closed in all directions by rugged, forest- 

 covered mountain slopes which rise from 

 two to over four thousand feet above its 



surface. Its expanse is unbroken by islands, 

 and has an area of between 192 to 195 

 square miles. Its diameter from north to 

 south is 21.6 miles and from east to west 12 

 miles. On looking down on Lake Tahoe 

 from the surrounding pine-covered heights, 

 one beholds a vast plain of the most won- 

 derful blue that can be imagined. Near 

 shore, where the bottom is of white sand, the 

 waters have an emerald tint, but are so 

 clear that objects far beneath the surface 

 may be readily distinguished. Farther lake- 

 ward, the tints change by insensible grada- 

 tion until the water is a deep blue, un- 

 rivaled even by the color of the ocean in its 

 deepest and most remote parts. On calm 

 summer days the sky, with its drifting 

 cloud banks and the rugged mountains with 

 their bare and usually snow-covered sum- 

 mits, are mirrored in the placid waters with 

 such wonderful distinctness and such accu- 

 racy of detail, that one is at a loss to tell 

 where the real ends and the duplicate be- 

 gins. While floating on the lake in a boat, 

 the transparency of the water gives the sen- 

 sation that one is suspended in mid-air, as 

 every detail on the bottom, fathoms below, 

 is clearly discernible. RUSSELL Lakes of 

 North America, ch. 4, p. 63. (G. & Co., 

 1895.) 



331. BEAUTY ENHANCED BY MYS- 

 TERY Towers and Castles of Native Rock- 

 Mode of Rock-formation Unknown Ex- 

 planation Carries the Difficulty a Step Fur- 

 ther Back. Every island and rocky crag 

 that rose in Lake Lahontan became a center 

 of accumulation for tufa deposits and was 

 transformed into strange and frequently 

 fantastic shapes by the material precipi- 

 tated upon it. Now that the waters of the 

 ancient sea have disappeared, these struc- 

 tures stand in the desert valleys like the 

 crumbling ruins of towers, castles, domes, 

 and various other shapes, in keeping with 

 the desolation surrounding them. The finest 

 examples of these water-built structures, 

 some of them a hundred feet or more in 

 height, occur about the border of Pyramid 

 and Winnemucca lakes, or rising from their 

 bottoms and still wholly or in part sub- 

 merged. The islands in Pyramid Lake are 

 sheathed from base to summit with these 

 deposits and their precipitous sides given a 

 convex outline, owing especially to the vast 

 deposits of dendritic tufa, which was pre- 

 cipitated most abundantly midway up the 

 slopes. . . . When the tufa towers and 

 castle-like piles are broken, the concentric 

 layers of which they are composed are re- 

 vealed and fill one with wonder at the vast 

 amount of material they contain, as well as 

 attract the eye on account of the delicacy 

 and beauty of their structure. Nowhere else 

 in this country, and, so far as reported, no- 

 where else in the world, are rocks formed of 

 precipitates from lake waters so magnifi- 

 cently displayed as in the desert valleys of 

 Nevada. 



