acinth, (comosus,) and the edges of upper stems and
leaves in many plants; while others, (Geranium lucidum,) are made to
delight us with their leaves rather than their blossoms; only I suppose, in
these, the scarlet leaf colour is a kind of early autumnal glow,--a
beautiful hectic, and foretaste, in sacred youth, of sacred death.

I observe, among the speculations of modern science, several, lately, not
uningenious, and highly industrious, on the subject of the relation of
colour in flowers, to insects--to selective development, etc., etc. There
_are_ such relations, of course. So also, the blush of a girl, when she
first perceives the faltering in her lover's step as he draws near, is
related essentially to the existing state of her stomach; and to the state
of it through all the years of her previous existence. Nevertheless,
neither love, chastity, nor blushing, are merely exponents of digestion.

All these materialisms, in their unclean stupidity, are essentially the
work of human bats; men of semi-faculty or semi-education, who are more or
less incapable of so much as seeing, much less thinking about, colour;
among whom, for one-sided intensity, even Mr. Darwin must be often ranked,
as in his vespertilian treatise on the ocelli of the Argus pheasant, which
he imagines to be artistically gradated, and perfectly imitative of a ball
and socket. If I had him here in Oxford for a week, and could force him to
try to copy a feather by Bewick, or to draw for himself a boy's thumbed
marble, his notions of feathers, and balls, {84} would be changed for all
the rest of his life. But his ignorance of good art is no excuse for the
acutely illogical simplicity of the rest of his talk of colour in the
"Descent of Man." Peacocks' tails, he thinks, are the result of the
admiration of blue tails in the minds of well-bred peahens,--and similarly,
mandrills' noses the result of the admiration of blue noses in well-bred
baboons. But it never occurs to him to ask why the admiration of blue noses
is healthy in baboons, so that it develops their race properly, while
similar maidenly admiration either of blue noses or red noses in men would
be improper, and develop the race improperly. The word itself 'proper'
being one of which he has never asked, or guessed, the meaning. And when he
imagined the gradation of the cloudings in feathers to represent successive
generation, it never occurred to him to look at the much finer cloudy
gradations in