One of the most perfectly decorative objects that I have ever seen in the animal world (you will find it in still-life form in our Natural History Museum) is the device by which a certain small possum has taught her young to accompany her from branch to branch. Along her back she seats her litter, then over their heads like the conducting-wire of a tram-line she extends her tail--and then (each like an electric connecting rod) up go the little tails, make a loop, adjust themselves to the maternal guide-rope, and hang on. And there, safe from upset, is the family-omnibus ready to start! Of course, you may say that is use; but it is use in which the spiritualities, faith, hope and love, begin to appear; and in the gentleness of its intention it forms a basis for the up-growth of beauty. Now all the arts are, in the same way, first of all structural--having for their starting-point a sound and economic use of the material on which they are based. Music, architecture, poetry, and the rest were all, to begin with, the result of an instinctive choice or selection, directed to the elimination of superfluities, accidents, excrescences--which to the craftsman’s purpose are nothing. Nature, in her seed-sowing, has gone to work to propagate by profusion; her method is to sow a million seeds so as to make sure that some may live; thus she meets and out-matches the chances that are against her. The seed of Art sprang up differently; maker-man took hold of the one selected seed, not of a dozen, or of a thousand dozen promiscuously, and bent his faculties on making that one seed (his chosen material) fit to face life and its chances: if a house--walls and roof calculated to keep out the rain and resist the force of storms: if a textile--fabric of a staple sufficient to resist the wear and tear to which it would be subjected: if a putting together of words meant to outlast the brief occasion of their utterance--then in a form likely to be impressive, and therefore memorable; so that in an age before writing was known they might find a safe tabernacle, travelling from place to place in the minds of men. And similarly with music--a system of sounds so ruled by structural law as to be capable of transmission either by instrument, or by voice disciplined and trained to a certain code of limitations. And being thus made memorable and passed from mouth to mouth, from one place to another, and from age to age, they acquired a social significance and importance; till, seeing them thus lifted above chance, man set himself to give them new forms of beauty and adornment.