ON COLOURS IN NATURE. 85 
and seventy of the elders of Israel alone out of all the con- 
eregation, saw the God of Israel, the sacred narrative pro- 
ceeds to state that in that vision of the Creator of all things, 
the colour of blue was specially conspicuous, as, so to speak, 
the footstool of the God of glory. ‘‘ There was under his 
feet, as 1t were, the paved work of a sapphire stone, and, as 
it were, the body of heaven in its clearness.” We are all of 
us familiar with the expression “ true blue ” in ordinary par- 
lance, but the very triteness of its usage may of itself be an 
indication that there is a deep and solemn reality underlying 
this idea. Is there not a tacit, though, it may be, almost 
unconscious, acknowledgment of the eternal verities hereby 
implied, that blue are the distant hills—blue by reason of 
their distance, which, above all objects of the visible creation, 
seem, by their towering summits heavenwards, by their lonely 
heights and unbroken solitude, apart from the life and ways 
of men, to speak of Him who is the unchanging Truth, and 
by their massiveness and enduring character to be girded 
about with power; and are they not in Holy Writ the 
favoured scenes of special manifestations of the Deity, and 
of communion between Himself and His creatures? 
Blue is the “‘ great and wide sea also,” unchanging in out- 
ward appearance through the lapse of ages, and showing no 
traces of alteration as the earth does in process of time, owing 
to eruption, earthquake, landslip, or other geological change. 
“Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow, 
Such as Creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.” 
Again, certain seas (those around the Channel Isles and 
also the Mediterranean) are of a particularly bright blue. If 
we now revert to the living products of the Divine hand, we 
shall find abundant evidence in flowers and butterflies of blue 
preponderating over some, and holding its own with all 
colours, and especially in the case of the butterflies. Of our 
own Hnelish wild flowers may be quoted as examples the 
various kinds of violet, the scabious, pinguicula, ajuga, self- 
heal, gentian, harebe!l, and other species of campanula, Vicia 
cracca, ground ivy, speedwell, forget-me-nots, blue pimpernel, 
sea aster, Scilla verna, Scilla nutans, corn blue-bottle, &c. 
Again,—what more lovely sight than that of a wood in 
early springtime, when, through the carpet of last autumn’s 
leaves sodden, trodden down, and decaying amid the miry 
clay, myriads of blue spires of our wood hyacinth, the Scilla 
nutans, are struggling upwards? Do they not seem to speak 
to us of dull earth transmuted into a higher nature, ever as 
