APPARENT EXCEPTIONS. 201 



habits of the rudest savage, who covers with 

 elaborate carving the handle of his war-club, or 

 the prow of his canoe. Is it likely that this 

 universal aim and purpose of the mind of Man 

 should be wholly without relation to the aims 

 and purposes of his Creator? He that formed 

 the eye to see beauty, shall He not see it ? He 

 that gave the human hand its cunning to work 

 for beauty, shall His hand never work for it ? 

 How, then, shall we account for all the beauty of 

 the world — for the careful provision made for it 

 where it is only the secondary object, not the first ? 

 Even in those cases, for example, where conceal- 

 ment is the main object in view, ornament is never 

 forgotten, but lies as it were underneath, carried 

 into effect under the conditions and limitations 

 imposed by the higher law and the more special 

 purpose. Thus the feathers of the Ptarmigan, 

 though confined by the law of assimilative colour- 

 ing to a mixture of black and white or gray, have 

 those simple colours disposed in crescent-bars and 

 mottlings of beautiful form, even as the lichens 

 which they imitate spread in radiating lines and 

 semicircular ripples over the weather-beaten 



