IN the whole brilliant museum which lavish Nature opens so bountifully before the eyes of those who can see-a class unhappily far smaller than it ought to be, but growing from day to day as each neophyte opens in turn the sealed eyes of his neighbors-there is nothing so lovely as the bright and graceful flowers of our meadows, our hedgerows, and our gardens. There is nothing inanimate to which we turn with so tender and so loving a regard; nothing which we so instinctively invest with the attri butes and emotions of the human soul. From the merest child and the veriest savage to the truest artist and the deepest philosopher, every heart has ever ready in its depths a thrill of delight in unison with those exquisite gems of God's handiwork. In a previous paper I have endeavored to trace this feeling to its varied sources in the minds of men, and to disentangle the many strands of simple and complex emotion which, when woven together, make up NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXVIII., No. 2

our total synthetic pleasure in the contemplation of a wayside posy. the analysis which I then undertook, it was necessary to accept the love of color in itself as a given factor, whose origin we were content for the time to leave unexplained. There is reason to think, however, that the pleasure of simple colors, red and orange and yellow, green and violet and purple, which stands out as so distinct an element in our æsthetic nature, may be finally traced back to the remote effects of flowers and fruits upon the animal kingdom generally, and upon primitive man in particular. So far as the human species is concerned, there can be little doubt that our color-sense depends more upon the golden rind of the orange, the crimson cheeks of the cherry, the melting tints of the mango and the peach, the blush of grapes and apples, or the ruddy glow of wayside berries, than upon the thousand beauties of English wild-flowers or the massive wealth of tropical blossoms. But if

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