which is so far from contributing to his beauty. How
well fitted is the wolf for running and leaping! how admirably is the
lion armed for battle! but will any one therefore call the elephant, the
wolf, and the lion, beautiful animals? I believe nobody will think the
form of a man's leg so well adapted to running, as those of a horse, a
dog, a deer, and several other creatures; at least they have not that
appearance: yet, I believe, a well-fashioned human leg will be allowed
to far exceed all these in beauty. If the fitness of parts was what
constituted the loveliness of their form, the actual employment of them
would undoubtedly much augment it; but this, though it is sometimes so
upon another principle, is far from being always the case. A bird on the
wing is not so beautiful as when it is perched; nay, there are several
of the domestic fowls which are seldom seen to fly, and which are
nothing the less beautiful on that account; yet birds are so extremely
different in their form from the beast and human kinds, that you cannot,
on the principle of fitness, allow them anything agreeable, but in
consideration of their parts being designed for quite other purposes. I
never in my life chanced to see a peacock fly; and yet before, very long
before I considered any aptitude in his form for the aerial life, I was
struck with the extreme beauty which raises that bird above many of the
best flying fowls in the world; though, for anything I saw, his way of
living was much like that of the swine, which fed in the farm-yard along
with him. The same may be said of cocks, hens, and the like; they are of
the flying kind in figure; in their manner of moving not very different
from men and beasts. To leave these foreign examples; if beauty in our
own species was annexed to use, men would be much more lovely than
women; and strength and agility would be considered as the only
beauties. But to call strength by the name of beauty, to have but one
denomination for the qualities of a Venus and Hercules, so totally
different in almost all respects, is surely a strange confusion of
ideas, or abuse of words. The cause of this confusion, I imagine,
proceeds from our frequently perceiving the parts of the human and other
animal bodies to be at once very beautiful, and very well adapted to
their purposes; and we are deceived by a sophism, which makes us take
that for a cause which is only a concomitant: this is the sophism of the
fly; who imagined h