anxiety or fatigue. Long, long before M.
Chevreul published his Theory of Colours, or
the Sydenham palace gardeners planted their
complementary beds, nature had repudiated
all daubing of her canvas and incongruity of
colouring, and had arranged her pallette and
her colour-box according to what scientific
men have only just now found out to be true
chromatic law. Never are red and blue
found on the same organ, or in actual contact
on the same plant; and always may you
find bits of complementary colour put in
somewhere, if you only look for them closely
enough. Thus, if the flower be yellow, will
there surely be a purple point on the stalk or
the leaf, or on some part of the corolla; if
it be purple, then you have a golden point
painted in instead; always, in short, is the
complementary colour obtained, though never
so minutely touched, on the humblest little
bract or sepal. This is a statement very
easy of verification; for, from the red
points on the buds of the blue Myosotis with its
golden eyes, to the broad division into purple
and gold of the dignified heartsease; from the
dark purple tips on the seed-vessels of the
yellow gorse, and the reddened lilac of the
primrose-stalk, to the violet-coloured heart
and yellow shadings on the tender leaves of
the crimson fuchsia, learned men say that
never can you find a plant which does not
contain in some fashion the three primal
colours; either simple, or combined into their
secondaries.

Before Euclid existed, before Phidias and
Praxiteles wrought the glories of the Parthenon,
before mathematicians calculated and
reasoned, or mathematical instrument-makers
formed a distinct branch of workers in brass
and steel; before little-goes were instituted,
and men spoilt their handwriting by scrawling
their examination papers—Nature, our
great schoolmistress, calmly settled the
first and latest laws of geometry. To her
star-clusters she gave geometric forms; some
she made spiral, others round; others again
she flattened out into a disc-like shape, and
others she left angular. To her minerals she
gave mathematical forms and precise angles,
and her crystals are typical of geometry.
Men have named from her cones, the
conic sections which have been too hard for
many a poor brain to master. And not only
conic sections, but she also scattered a series
of beautiful rhomboidal figures, with definite
angles, on the surface of her lime or fir-
cones. Hexagonal cells, the one form which
men have found to contain maximum strength
with maximum space, were inaugurated in
the honeycomb in the beginning of time, while
the cycloid curve, the swiftest line of descent
discovered by Leibnitz, and Newton, and
L'Hôpital—all set calculating by John
Bernouille's letter to the learned men of Europe,
challenging them to solve that problem—had
been solved, discovered, and practised
centuries before; whenever, indeed, an eagle
swooped down upon his prey; for he swooped
in the true cycloid curve, or swiftest line of
descent.

Before the first clumsy sail was hoisted by
a savage hand, the little Portuguese man-of-
war, that frailest and most graceful nautilus
boat, had skimmed over the seas, with all its
feathery sails set in the pleasant breeze; and
before the great British Admiralty marked its
anchors with the Broad Arrow, mussels and
pinna had been accustomed to anchor
themselves by flukes to the full as effective as
the iron ones in the government dockyards.
The duck used oars before we did; and
rudders were known by every fish with a
tail, countless ages before human pilots
handled tillers; the floats on the fisherman's
nets were prefigured in the bladders
on the seaweed; the glow-worm and
the firefly held up their lighthouses before
pharos or beacon-tower guided the wanderer
among men; and, as long before Phipps
brought over the diving-bell to this country
as the creation, spiders were making and
using air-pumps to descend into the deep.
Our bones were moved by tendons and
muscles long before chains and cords were
made to pull heavy weights from place
to place. Nay, until quite lately—leaving
these discoveries to themselves—we took
no heed of the pattern set us in the backbone,
with the arching ribs springing from it,
to construct the large cylinder which we often
see now attaching all the rest of a set of
works. This has been a very modern
discovery; but, prior even to the first man,
Nature had cast such a cylinder in every
ribbed and vertebrate animal she had made.
The cord of plaited iron too, now used to drag
machinery up inclined planes, was typified in
the backbones of the eels and snakes in Eden:
tubular bridges and hollow columns had been
in use since the first bird with hollow bones
flew through the wood, or the first reed
waved in the wind. Strange that the principle
of the Menai Straits' railway bridge,
and of the ion pillars in the Crystal Palace,
existed in the Arkite dove, and in the bulrushes
that grew round the cradle of Moses!
Our railway tunnels are wonderful works of
science, but the mole tunneled with its foot,
and the pholas with one end of its
shell, before our navvies handled pick or
spade upon the heights of the iron roads:
worms were prior to gimlets, ant-lions were
the first funnel-makers, a beaver showed
men how to make their mill-dams, and the
pendulous nests of certain birds swung gently
in the air before the keen wit of even the most
loving mother laid her nursling in a rocking-
cradle. The carpenter of olden time lost
many useful hours in studying how to make
the ball and socket-joint which he bore about
with him in his own hips and shoulders; the
universal joint, which filled all men with
wonder when first discovered, he had in his
wrist; in the jaws of all flesh-eating animals