branches of modern study and enquiry. It is the beauty of _process_. The practical men among us watch process in its mechanical forms as contrived by invention. The naturalists and the men of science have to an extraordinary extent developed our perception of it in nature: they shew us its range, and its incredible delicacy, flexibility, and intricacy; they shew us its enormous patience in the unceasing yet age-long movements which by microscopic or less than microscopic changes accumulate the coal, or lessen the mountain; they shew us the wonderful power of adaptation by which it accommodates itself to surroundings, and appropriates and transforms them to its need. The embryologist developes its wonders as it makes 'the bones to grow in the womb of her that is with child.' And the historians in their sphere do the like: it is for them, if not the beginning and end of their work, at least the most powerful of their methods, to shew the processes by which institutions, customs, opinions, rise and decline; to arrange the facts so as to display on their chart the steps of growth, the stages of decay; to shew influences blending to form events, and parting again to destroy or re-shape them. There is beauty in all this, more than we can, perhaps, altogether analyse or explain. As living beings we sympathise with the life and movement of it all (or, as in the case of intricate machinery, with the imitation of life) compared with what stands stark, solid, unchanging; as intelligent beings we revel and delight in its intricacy, and, further, we are gratified by the way in which it subdues with explanation what would be anomalous, abrupt, motiveless, in the way of change or event. It gives us something like the pleasure which we take in the beauty of the exquisite subtle curves and shaded surfaces of a Raphael figure compared with the rough outline of a Dürer woodcut. But we could not long rest in the admiration of mere process, whether delicate or colossal. There is a rational element present in, or controlling, our sense of beauty, which asks whence and whither, which demands unity in detail; and this finds altogether new and delightful gratification when it can see a relation, a meaning, a grouping, a symmetry, of which processes are the ministers and instruments.