We shall close this chapter with the following remarks on “Taste” from W. Bridges Adams’s valuable book on “English Pleasure Carriages:”— “There is a notion prevalent amongst uninstructed people that the quality called taste is a peculiar gift which an individual is endowed with at birth, and which cannot be acquired by any amount of application. Some portion of this belief is founded on reason, inasmuch as the physical faculties of some individuals at their birth are more perfect than those of others. Some are born with weak and some with strong eyes, and the same difference may exist in the perceptive faculties generally, on which faculties the quality of taste must depend. But even as weak eyes may be strengthened by judicious treatment, and strong eyes may be weakened by injudicious treatment, so inferior perceptive faculties may be improved by cultivation, and those which might have been first-rate may disappear by neglect. Even in those nations where the germs of taste are developed in but few individuals, where the mass of the community cannot discover beauty for themselves, they are yet susceptible of its influence when it is placed before them by others. “Taste may be considered as another word for truth or proportion, both morally and physically. Much false taste exists in the community, and always has existed, but the total amount is continually lessening. The reason of the false taste is the imitative nature of man, which in an uncultivated state follows without examining. But even as it is the nature of water to attain a state of rest after violent oscillation, so it is the tendency of truth and proportion to grow out of the chaos of either thought or matter. “Carriages constructed for the purposes of pleasure are works of art, in which taste may be widely developed in form, colour, and proportion, but the former is of course subservient to the mechanical construction. The hitherto defective mechanism of carriages, in which ‘a large wheel is made to follow a small one,’ has to a great extent destroyed proportion, and given a general license to all kinds of heterogeneous devices and barbarous ornaments, as if to overlay defects which there were no apparent means of obviating. Custom has reconciled the public to this discrepancy, which, were it now to appear for the first time, would excite universal distaste and ridicule.