we have preserved specimens of the early creations, rivalling in beauty any of those which now exist.
If we can but show that a series of novelties for art may be found by searching over the charnel-houses of the ancient world, possessing the charm of symmetry and that beauty of arrangement and decoration which adapts them, as we believe, to numerous ornamental purposes, we shall be satisfied. We do but suggest an examination. We have confined ourselves to a few of the numerous remains of animal life. “The sermons in stones” are varied beyond the conception of those who have not attempted to read them. Between the earliest attempts of Nature to form a cell in which life should exert its mysteries, up to the most elaborated and gigantic form which ever swam in the ancient waters or roamed in the wide savannahs, there is one unceasing, never-failing effort to multiply the beautiful, and to make it conformable to the useful. In conclusion, we may again remark that whether we seek to copy from Nature her older or her more recent works, we shall find in them all that peculiar charm which
“Can so inform
The mind that is within us—so impress
With quietness and beauty—and so feed
With lofty thoughts,”
that the results of that study will be the production of beautiful works, all tending, by their spells, to elevate humanity.
II.
In the previous chapter we confined ourselves to a selection of a few fossil shells, with the hope of drawing the attention of the art-manufacturer to a source whence he may gather, from thousands of examples, forms of the utmost symmetry, which appear to fit themselves in a peculiar manner for his especial purposes. The beauty of vegetable forms has, through all time, won the attention of the artist. The lotus and the acanthus are rendered classical by their numerous adaptations to ornamental uses. The ivy and the laurel, the nepenthe and the convolvulus, with numerous other plants and flowers, are to be found moulded and painted on works of ornament and utensils for domestic use through all ages.
Numerous and ever graceful as are the forms of the living vegetable world—and these have been extensively copied—there is a vast field within which diligent search will discover a great variety of plants, which are no less beautiful and far less common than their living analogues, in the bygone flora preserved so strangely in those strata which mark the mutations of our mysterious world.
The flora of the Carboniferous period was of a most extraordinary character, and luxuriant to an extent far exceeding even that which is now exhibited in the forests of equatorial climes. Growing most rapidly and of a lax tissue, these plants were of short duration, and were after death rapidly converted into a mass of uniform structure, such as we have now exhibited in every bed of fossil fuel. Three hundred species of plants belong to the Coal formations of Great Britain alone; and it is found that local causes, with which we are not acquainted, have modified in a strange manner the plastic vegetation of this period; and in what appear to be analogous positions we find whole genera and even orders of plants of very opposite botanical character, presenting a greater disparity of vegetation than countries the most remote in geographical position.[B] Thus within a small area we have a variety of strange forms, few of which do not adapt themselves for ornamental purposes.