256 LORD GRIMTHORPE 
aurora borealis as a perfectly new phenomenon to many 
people, and indeed always new the first time they see it, and 
much too rare to admit of the explanation that admiration of 
it is an inherited taste. 
Another not so grand, but a still newer, phenomenon is the 
beautiful coloured spectra of electrical discharges through a 
tube almost vacuous, or filled with certain rare gases. Nobody 
in the world had seen that, or anything at all like it, until it 
appeared of itself as soon as the requisite conditions took 
place a few years ago; and yet nobody in the world would 
pronounce it anything but beautiful. So are many of the 
phenomena of polarised light, which are also quite modern, 
and are yet as unknown to the common run of men as those 
electrical discharges are. Not only those occasional exhibi- 
tions, but some constant ones, are equally surprises to those 
who see them for the first time, and had never been seen by 
the civilised world till quite lately. Such are, or rather were, 
those magnificent terraces in New Zealand, which were 
destroyed by an earthquake almost as soon as they had been 
introduced to general notice by Mr. Froude’s ‘‘ Oceana.” In 
short, if the theory of beauty being only what we have learnt 
by long habit to think so were true, we should admire nothing 
that is very different from what we are used to. Some people 
indeed are stupid enough to think a@ priori that they never 
will ; but very few indeed are so stupid as to withhold their 
admiration when they see a really beautiful object, entirely 
different from anything they have seen or imagined before. 
It is old tastes that are depraved by fashion and prejudices, 
not new ones ; and the power of appreciating any real beauty 
that we have never seen before is latent and as ready to start 
into action the moment a proper object is presented to it as 
a needle is to jump up to a magnet, though it may never have 
been within miles of one before, and to turn towards a 
particular spot on the earth, thousands of miles away, the 
moment it has been stroked with a magnet and set free. 
The same remarks apply to an infinite number of non-living 
objects which the most audacious theory-monger cannot 
pretend to have been modified by any non-creative agency. 
Such are natural water in all its forms—stormy or still seas, 
mm sunshine and under clouds, waterfalls, rivers, brooks and 
lakes in the bottom of a valley, and the valley itself; moun- 
tains and hills, and all the green things upon earth ; dews and 
frosts, ice and snow, and what are called frost-ferns on glass 
windows ; “iridescent films’? of very thin plates; polished 
marbles and fine woods, of which the beauty is latent till it is 
so brought out, and then it appears in endless variety. 
