is recognized as the result of one creative idea. Any departure from such a recognition tends to notions which are essentially anthropomorphic and utilitarian.

In the enquiry before us, we have no such danger to guard against. The particular pattern which is formed by shades of colour, is, with few exceptions, so manifestly unimportant to the economy of the creature, that we feel no disposition to account for it in any other way than by referring at once to the idea of the Creator.

There are, however, some exceptions, which must be noticed. The colour of certain birds is so similar to that of the localities where they are found, that we can hardly doubt this circumstance is important to their welfare as enabling them more readily to conceal themselves from their enemies. The same may be said of many kinds of fish. The change of colour on the approach of winter observable in some birds and animals is supposed to answer purposes similarly useful; and there are probably many other exceptions.

Setting these aside, the phenomena of colour in plants and animals refer us at once to the will of the Creator. We sce these things so because He would have them so; and there is no intervention of any probable use that might have modified or suggested the creative thought.

The colour of a spot upon the wing of a bird or a butterfly seems to be a matter of perfect indifference, and so perhaps it may be in respect of the more palpable requirements of the creature; but the distinction is only apparent, and not real. It is highly probable that the colours of animals are determined by laws just as fixed and unalterable as those which regulate the construction of their most necessary organs. We may, indeed, find it much more difficult to arrive at the principles on which the colour pattern has been elaborated; but, at all events, we may apply ourselves to the task, encouraged by the firm persuasion that nature is never capricious.

One of the most essential points to be observed in any work of art produced by the use of colours is the preservation of harmony of tone. It is needless to prove this, for almost any clever picture, ancient or modern, is an exemplification. We have only to fancy an azure patch from one of the early Flemish painters introduced into a composition of Salvator Rosa, or a sunset from Turner, in the same frame with a Canaletti, and we perceive at once the fatal incongruity.

But these are extreme cases, whereas the rule is most exact. Let any artist, however skilful, attempt to restore a gap in one of Claude's landscapes, it will be fortunate, indeed, if he does not produce a blot fatal buty of the picture. And why? Because of the extreme

difficulty of copying the tone of the original. The drawing may be equally good, the colour imperceptibly different, but the same mellow sunlight shines not in the picture and in the patch; the atmosphere differs in the two; the tone is not preserved.

I bring forward this to show how sensitive we are to the very nicest distinctions in tone.

Now, in landscape scenery, provision is made for the perfect preservation of tone by the distance of the source from whence the light proceeds, so that although the tone may be entirely changed many times in a single day, as at sunrise, noon, sunset, or in a storm or shower, still the tone of the whole scene, at any instant, is perfectly harmonious.

Portions of trophical or polar scenes would be discordant if they could be introduced into a landscape in a temperate region. Yet they are at unity with themselves. I remember, on one occasion, observing the colour of the eastern part of the Red Sea, it was a palpable ultramarine, yet such was the hue of the mountains of Arabia on the opposite shore, that the intense blue of the sea was in perfect keeping. Could that blue be transferred to the water in one of our Westmoreland lakes, the result would be monstrous.

Thus far we are following in a beaten track, but I am not aware that the accurate preservation of tone in the colours of all natural objects has been so frequently the subject of remark. Yet, if we take any production of nature that is complete in itself, we shall, I think, find its colours so adjusted as to be perfectly harmonious.

In birds, from the gaudy parrot to the wren, we shall not meet with an instance in which the colours are otherwise assorted. We find an almost infinite variety of combinations of tints, and unless some very definite principles had been observed in their disposition, we should have had numberless examples of ill-matched colours, and want of unity in tone. A very slight alteration would be sufficient to produce a manifest incongruity.

Take, for example, the common house sparrow, with his plumage of brown, black, and grey let the grey be changed to the grey or dun that prevails in the pigeon tribe; the combination would be disagreeable, and the tone of the whole destroyed. The plumage of birds affords few examples of combinations of tints more exquisitely balanced than the mottled browns and buffs on the back of a snipe or a woodcock. In the latter bird many of the adjacent feathers are nearly of a cedar pencil colour. The jay has feathers of a very similar hue, but let some of these feathers from a jay be placed on the back of the snipe or the woodcock, the combination is false and disagreeable.

The wings of lepidopterous insects afford an admirable field whereon to test the truth of our proposition. The colouring is of every possible variety-bold and vigorous or delicate and subdued, strongly contrasted or exquisitely shaded; yet the preservation of tone is never violated. Our common English butterflies are fine examples. What can be con ceived more perfect than the painting of the common peacock butterfly. Vanessa Io, or that of the admiral, Vanessa Atalanta? Yet if we should introduce a portion of the scarlet from the admiral into the rich maroon grounding of the peacock, how unseemly would be the result!

We are familiar with the brimstone butterfly. Now in this insect we have a combination of two colours generally considered to be inharmonious, yellow and orange. An orange patch on a yellow ground is a false combination. How, then, is the tone preserved? The orange is reduced in size to a small sharply-defined dot, and in this form it gives a life to the broad yellow wing, without in the least interfering with But in another closely allied insect found on the Continent, the orange occupies a large space in the centre of the yellow. Here is a fresh difficulty; and how is it met? The orange is no more a sharply defined patch, but is beautifully shaded off until it imperceptibly merges into the yellow, like a similar combination in the petals of the Escoltzia.

the tone.

The colours of shells are hardly to be considered fair examples, because they are not complete natural productions without the animals, and many of the marine mollusca are brightly tinted in a way that must be taken into account when we regard the tone of the whole object.

Yet shells are most harmoniously coloured. Mitra episcopalis is perhaps the coarsest and least beautiful of any, yet the tone, though not pre-eminently beautiful, is well preserved.

We might prolong these illustrations to almost any extent, but, before we leave this part of the subject, it may be well to enquire what is the exact meaning we attach to the word tone.

The term is incapable of exact definition. Tone in a combination of colours may be recognized and admired, but can never be described, any more than the grace or beauty of a curved line. We have no equation that can express the conditions of beauty in a curved line, yet nothing can be more exact than these conditions. The slightest deflection is fatal.

So in music. Harmony is supposed to be subject to laws that can be written, though this is every day becoming more doubtful; but melody obeys no such restrictions. Yet is not melody a thing as true as the existence of the sun in the heavens?

The tints of colours are infinitely more varied than the recognized intervals in the musical scale. How, then, can we expect to find rules that shall suffice to secure that which in combinations of colours is analogous to a beautiful melody or an impressive harmony in music? Such rules, if we could find them, would constitute a perfect definition of tone in colour patterns.

We have had occasion to remark that certain colours are not found to harmonize with each other, when placed together; decorative artists therefore avoid such combinations on ordinary occasions; but when the utmost possible intensity of effect is aimed at-as, for example, in a picture lately exhibited in Liverpool, of "Queen Titania and her Train," where the colouring was intended to dazzle the eye with its gorgeous splendour-here these rejected combinations are the very means employed to produce the required effect, and dashes of rose colour are thrown on pink, and streaks of geranium on the rose ; greens, blues, and yellows are charged one upon another, and the result, when skilfully managed, is certainly very brilliant.

Nature has anticipated the artist even in this. If we examine any of our British birds, we shall find no single instance of a colour placed upon another with which it does not harmonize; the tone is uniformly moderate, and the contrasts of colour, where they exist, are simply beautiful and pleasing. But we turn to some of the fairy-like birds of Brazil, and what do we behold? The most surprising combinationsorange charged on crimson, blues surmounted by greens, and these again by still more vivid greens; ordinary rules are set utterly at defiance, yet no chance-medley work is here; all this anomalous painting is but the daring of a hand too skilful to require to work by rule, and the result is splendour surpassing all description.

Our minds are almost irresistibly led from this to an analogous effect in music. Discord following discord "in the lowest depths to find a deeper still," creates a thrill that no measured resolutions can produce, but it requires the mind of a Mendelssohn to direct where these consecutive discords shall come, and what they shall be.

Have we then, after all, arrived at no more than this-that nature has provided that the colour patterns in all her productions shall be agreeable to the eye, and produce in us perceptions of beauty? We have, I think, done much more than this. We have seen how easily a contrary effect might have been produced. We have seen that colour patterns, without the most exact and skilful disposition, could no more produce what we see in nature, than an animal running over the keys of a piano could produce a melody. The hand must be there, and the skill to guide the hand. We have in nature thousands of colour

melodies, where a false tint would be like a false note in music; and just as a musical melody indicates a skilled composer, so does each one of these colour patterns show, as much by what is avoided as by what is seen, the hand of the all-venerated and infinite artist.

It follows necessarily from the laws of optics, that when we look on any scene in nature, masses of colour are presented to the eye only in the centre and foreground of the prospect, the distance causing all objects approaching the circumference of our view to appear lighter, paler, and smaller. The artist, aware of this, in painting a group of flowers, places the brightest and heaviest in the centre, and surrounds them with such as are more delicate, or with a spray of foliage. Nature does the same. The full-blown rose is in the centre, the buds stand around it. More conspicuously in the wings of lepidopterous insects, masses of colour are thrown towards the centre, surrounded by spots or patches, whilst the edge is Vandyked, scalloped, or looped, and beautifully finished off with a ciliary fringe.

A peculiar configuration of colour, admitting of considerable variety in the details, but disposed after the same type, is frequently a distinctive mark of affinity amongst natural productions. This is too well known to require much illustration. There are, of course, numerous exceptions, but as a rule, for the most part it holds good, that animals, birds, insects, and shells, of the same genus, wherever found, are respectively distinguished by the same style of painting. Now here the interest manifestly depends upon the value we attach to specific distinctions. If we believe in species, and define a species to be all the individuals descended, or that may have descended, from a single pair, then to us the typical colouring of allied species must be most deeply interesting, for it serves no economic purposes. That the very peculiar painting of the European quail, for instance, is a repitition of the same design that is seen in the quail of Australia, is, so far as we can see, unimportant to the bird. Distinct creative acts have produced the two species, why then so alike and yet so different? Is it too bold to say that the Creator, by this arrangement, encourages and helps our study of his works? Such study would be almost impossible without recognition of natural orders or groups, and these are nothing more than assemblages of species that we regard as related, because they have many characters in common.

We now approach the most difficult portion of the subject. In the the colour patterns of natural productions, we may perhaps think we pretty clearly discern indications of a few general principles, in accordance with which, certain combinations of colours have been adopted in preference to others; but when we attempt to deal with