And Fontenelle, speaking in the language not of poetry but of science:--"Most animals--as, for instance, bees, spiders and beavers--have a kind of art peculiar to themselves; but each race of animals has no more than one art, and this one has had no first inventor among the race. Man, on the other hand, has an infinity of different arts which were not born with his race, and of which the glory is his own." Dr Johnson might reply that those properties of variety and of originality or individual invention, which Fontenelle himself alleges in the ingenuities of man but not in those of the lower animals, are sufficient to make a generic difference, and to establish the impropriety of calling a honeycomb or a spider's web a work of Art. It is not our purpose to trespass on ground so debateable as that of the nature of consciousness in the lower animals. Enough that when we use the term Art of any action, it is because we are thinking of properties in the action from which we infer, whether justly or not, that the agent voluntarily and designedly puts forth skill for known ends and by regular and uniform methods. If, then, we were called upon to frame a general definition of Art, giving the word its widest and most comprehensive meaning, it would run thus:--_Every regulated operation or dexterity by which organized beings pursue ends which they know beforehand, together with the rules and the result of every such operation or dexterity_. Here it will be well to consider very briefly the natural history of the name which has been given to this very comprehensive conception by the principal branches of civilized mankind. Our own word Art the English language has taken, as all the Romance languages of modern Europe have taken theirs, directly from the Latin. The Latin _ars_, according to the prevailing opinion of philologists, proceeds from a root AR, of which the primitive signification was to put or fit things together, and which is to be found in a large family of Greek words. The Greek [Greek: technae], the name both for arts in the particular and art in the abstract, is by its root related both to [Greek: tek-ton] and [Greek: tek-non], and thus contains the allied ideas of making and begetting. The _proprium_ of art in the logic of the Stoics, "to create and beget," was strictly in accordance with this etymology. The Teutonic _Kunst_ is formed from _konnen_, and _konnen_ is developed from a primitive _Ich kann_. In _kann_ philology is inclined to recognize a preterite form of a lost verb, of which we find the traces in _Kin-d_, a child; and the form _Ich kann_ thus meaning originally "I begot," contains the germ of the two several developments,--_konnen_, "to be master," "to be able," and _kennen_, "to know." We thus see that the chief Indo-European languages have with one consent extended a name for the most elementary exercise of a constructive or productive power, till that name has