the Creative-Worker
that he possesses a certain identity of mind in the _constructive_
department with his creature-workers, and this upon the principle on
which we infer an identity of mind between the creature-workers of
China, ancient Egypt, and our own country, seeing that their works are
identical, must we not also infer, on the same principle, that he
possesses in the _aesthetic_ department a certain identity with them
also. True, this region of the beautiful, ever surrounded by an
atmosphere of obscure, ill-settled metaphysics, is greatly less clear
than that mechanical province of whose various machines, whether of
Divine or human contrivance, it can be at least affirmed that machines
they _are_, and that they effect their purposes by contrivances of the
same or of resembling kinds. And yet the appearance in nature, age after
age, of the same forms and colors of beauty which man, in gratifying his
taste for the lovely in shape and hue, is ever reproducing for himself,
does seem to justify our inference of an identity of mind in this
province also. The colors of the old geologic organisms, like those of
the paintings of ancient Egypt, are greatly faded. A few, however, of
the Secondary, and even Palaeozoic shells, still retain the rich
prismatic hues of the original nacre. Many of the Tertiary division
still bear the distinctive painted spots. Some of the later fossil
fishes, when first laid open in the rock, exhibit the pearly gleam that
must of old have lighted up the green depths of the water as they darted
through. Not a few of the fossil corals preserve enough of their former
color to impart much delicacy of tint to the marbles in which they
occur. But it is chiefly in form, not in shade or hue, that we find in
the organisms of the geologic ages examples of that beauty in which man
delights, and which he is ever reproducing for himself. There is scarce
an architectural ornament of the Gothic or Grecian styles which may not
be found existing as fossils in the rocks. The Ulodendron was sculptured
into gracefully arranged rows of pointed and closely imbricated leaves,
similar to those into which the Roman architects fretted the torus of
the Corinthian order. The Sigillaria were fluted columns ornately
carved in the line of the channelled flutes; the Lepidodendra bore,
according to their species, sculptured scales, or lozenges, or egg-like
hollows, set in a sort of frame, and relieved into knobs and furrows;
all