258 LORD GRIMTHORPE 
is, and that there can be no greater delusion than to fancy that 
you can produce beauty by merely making something opposite 
in all its features to something else which you know to be 
ugly. The useful or the strong can be produced by scientific 
invention and adequate knowledge of the laws of nature. No . 
knowledge and no rules of science or art have ever been able 
to produce the beautiful, if they are able to keep designers 
from very gross defects or blunders. 
If that is so, it follows that even if beauty did not so 
vastly preponderate over ugliness in nature, yet any con- 
siderable quantity of it would be a phenomenon requiring 
explanation. No talking abont the laws of chance would do 
anything for it, even if chance can be admitted as a scientific 
cause of any phenomenon. ‘The once-popular toy called the 
kaleidoscope, which was invented by Sir David Brewster, 
a great optical philosopher, presents an infinite number of 
pretty figures as you turn it round, which are made only 
by a good many coloured bits of glass or stones tumbled 
about promiscuously, and so you might call them all beautiful 
pictures produced by chance. But until design and con- 
trivance were brought in, and the machine made what it was 
by a pair of reflecting glasses set at the proper angle, there ~ 
was no beauty at all. It was the glasses that produced the 
pretty radiating and symmetrical figures out of each confused 
little heap formed by chance. Chance very seldom produces 
beauty without the intervention of something that lifts the 
arrangement above that of chance. Mere heaps of stones which 
have been broken and thrown together by some natural con- 
vulsion have no beauty; as, for instance, at Ilkley, in Wharfe- 
dale. That is just the converse or opposite of the composition 
of stones and marbles and crystals and vegetables, by what 
we may call the constructive laws of nature as opposed to 
destruction. ‘The former almost always produce beauty ; the 
latter very seldom do. 
In like manner decaying substances are generally ugly and 
nasty, until some reconstructive process has set in which is 
going to produce new life. I know that the hving creatures 
which are often the first products of decay are generally nasty 
enough looking things too, and so are some of the fungi, but 
they never last long. Moreover, I by no means say that ' 
beauty is universal, even among things which have ample 
merits of their own, such as oysters, to whom unknown ages ot 
natural selection and admiration by man have been unable to 
impart anything that their greatest admirers can call beauty 
externally. WhatI do say is that the enormous quantity of 
natural beauty in the world is wholly inexplicable by any 
