The decorative art, instead of seeking its renovation in the things of old, would profit greatly by drawing its inspiration from the infinity of beauties distributed throughout Nature. They abound and superabound:—
1st, In the highly accented forms of tropical plants. Ours only produce their effect in masses, and on a grand scale.
2nd, In those of a great number of the lower animals, radiata, and others; in many of the little floating molluscs, living and imperceptible flowers, the design of which, when enlarged, might suggest some very original ideas.
3rd, In certain parts of the most despised creatures; as, for example, in the eyes of the fly.
4th, In the forms, designs, and colours one detects in the thickness of the living tissue; as, for example, on lifting with the scalpel the strata of the wing-sheath of the beetles. Nature, which has so embellished the surface, has hidden, perhaps, still more beauty in the depth. Nothing is finer than the vital fluids, when seen in the mobility of their circulation, and in the delicate canals where that circulation is accomplished and defined. They speak to us less eloquently, and impress us less forcibly by the splendour of the glittering leaves among which they circulate, than by the expressive forms in which we divine the mystery of their life. These are their visible energies.
NOTE 11.—Book ii., Chaps. ix. and x.
The Spider.—These two chapters are mainly the result of our own observations. We have profited, however, by several authorities; especially by the capital and classical work, the grand labour of Walckenaër,—which is of importance both for the description, classification, and moral history of the Spiders.
Azara tells us that in Paraguay the natives spin the cocoon of a great orange-coloured spider fully an inch in diameter. Sir George Staunton, the English ambassador to China, in his "Travels in Java" (vol. i., p. 343) informs us that the epeiras of Asia weave such stout webs that they can only be cut with a sharp-edged instrument; at the Bermudas, their webs are capable of arresting the progress of a bird as big as a thrush (Richard Stafford, Coll. Acad., ii., p. 156).