easily understood. It is so with the more simple
and familiar instances of adaptation furnished by the works of the
Creator. We infer from them, more directly than from the complex
mechanisms, that he who wrought of old after the manner of a man must
have, in his intellectual character, if I may so express myself, certain
man-like qualities and traits. In all those works on Natural Theology
that treat, like the work of Paley, on the argument of design, the
assumption of a certain unity of the intellectual nature of the Creator
and creature is made, tacitly at least, the basis of all the reasonings;
and it is in the cases in which the design is most simple that the
argument is most generally understood. It is in the lower _skirts_ of
the Divine nature that we most readily trace the resemblance to the
nature of man,--an effect, mayhap, of the narrow reach of our faculties
in their present infantile state.

[Illustration: Fig. 101.

SIGILLARIA GROESERI

(_Coal Measures._)]

[Illustration: Fig. 102.

Fig. 103. Fig. 104.

WHORLED SHELLS OF THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.[23]]

But the resemblance is not restricted to the constructive department.
Both in the Chinese collection and among the Egyptian antiquities
exhibited in the British Museum, I found color as certainly as
mechanical contrivance. And the color furnished not only a practical
example from both the early and the remote peoples of the same sort of
chemical science as exists at the present time among ourselves in our
dyeworks and pigment manufactories, but it also showed a certain
identity with our own of their sense of beauty. The Chinese satins are
gorgeous with green, blue, yellow, scarlet, crimson, and purple, and
have fringes heavy with thread of gold. Gilding is as common among this
distant people as among ourselves, and at once shows a familiarity with
the art of the gold beater, and a sensibility to the beauty of a golden
surface; and in the painted ornaments I detected the rich tints of
vermilion and crimson lake, with the mineral blues, yellows, and greens.
In the Egyptian department, though the blanching influences of three
thousand years had dimmed the tints and tarnished the metals, I found
evidence of the same regard to hue and lustre as exists still in China
and among ourselves; all that now pleases the eye in London and Pekin
had pleased it in Thebes during the times of the earlier Pharaohs. And
just as we infer from the mechanical contrivances of