ON THE BEAUTY OF NATURE. 265 
when one was found in theice of Siberia. Then if in Egypt we turned to the 
tombs of the kings of the third and fourth dynasty, and took the inscrip- 
tions of the Egyptians, there we would find various objects in Nature 
produced with marvellous accuracy which the Egyptians of the present day 
would be utterly incapable of producing ; so the effect of Nature upon these 
men must have been very great. If the high development of mind, and 
that high appreciation of all that was beautiful, was the result of a gradual 
development, he was afraid they must go back to most extraordinary 
antiquity to find the dawn of the sense of the beautiful. Indeed, he was 
convinced of two things—that the two great bars to the theory of evolution 
as applied to man were the existence of systematised articulate language, 
and the presence of the graphic instinct. There was no animal that could 
draw, and no animal that attempted to reproduce objects. Were it not for 
language, and the existence of a language, human beings would not have 
been enabled to communicate thoughts from one to another, and were it 
not for the existence of the graphic instinct which called into existence 
the art of writing, then culture would have died out as individuals die out. 
It was the desire to reproduce objects around that formed the basis, and was 
one of the greatest powers of civilisation, namely, the art of writing. So 
from that point of view the subject Lord Grimthorpe had touched upon was 
one of considerable interest. There was another point, and that was the 
fact that when one turned to the very early monuments one saw how the 
lowest objects which had been spoken of were admired for their beauty. It 
was now pretty conclusively proved that one of those curious spiral ornaments 
on the whorls from Troy and from the islands of the Mediterranean were 
derived from the marking of shells, and the forms of the limbs of the cuttle-fish. 
So when we turned to the Assyrian and Babylonian monuments, we 
found the earliest decorations derived from the leaves of the palm tree. He 
had lately examined a monument bearing date 2,500 years before the Christian 
era, in which a frieze of birds formed the chief decoration. The lion was 
also frequently used upon Assyrian bowls, and there was also adapted to 
the handles of artistic objects a figure of the gazelle, one of the most beautiful 
animals in existence, The paper to his mind seemed to offer another strong 
barrier to the theory which, as regards mankind, he certainly had never been 
able to accept ; and the more he studied the monuments of the past, and 
the more he studied history, and saw what great and infinite mental power 
was called into force, both in written and spoken language, the more difliculty 
he found in adopting the evolutionary theory. 
Mr. H. Brenoxp said that many of the objects that were reverenced 
among the Egyptians appeared to us now not to represent at all the objects 
of beauty ; but on the contrary, looking at some of their Gods, they had 
always appeared to him not so much calculated to evoke a sense of reverence 
as objects directly suggestive of hidden laws of beauty. 
Rev. Prepenpary Wace, D.D., said one point had been raised in 
the discussion to which he wished to refer. The speaker who endeavoured 
to explain our enjoyment of the beauty of a sunset must have forgotten 
