We see a certain wastefulness attaching to many of the most beautiful biological manifestations in the world. Up to a certain point, the construction of flower, bird, beast, fish, shows a wonderful economy of structure, of means to end (it is the same also in the arts). But there comes a point at which Nature, “letting herself go,” becomes fantastic, extravagant--may one not say “wilful”?--in the forms she selects for her final touches of adornment. And is it not nearly always when the matter in hand is most closely related to the “will to live”--or, in other words, in relation to the amative instincts--that the “art of living” breaks out, and that Nature quits all moderation of design and becomes frankly ornamental and extravagant? Just at the point where to be creative is the immediate motive, where, in the fulfilment of that motive, life is found to be a thing of delight, just there, Nature, being amative, becomes playful, exuberant and ornamental. There are some birds which, in this connection, carry upon their persons adornments so extravagant that one wonders how for so many generations they have been able to live and move and multiply, bearing such edifices upon their backs, their heads, their tails--that they were not a crushing hindrance to the necessary affairs of life. They certainly cannot have been a help; and yet--they still persist in them! Taking, then, these natural embryonic beginnings as our starting point, I would be inclined to trace out the living value of art and ornament somewhat upon these lines: Exuberance--the emergence of beauty and adornment, in addition to the mere functional grace arising out of fitness for use--has always been going on through the whole process of creation among animate nature. We see it established in a thousand forms, not only in bird, beast and reptile, but in the vegetable world as well. The tendency of all life that has found a fair field for its development, is to play with its material--to show that it has something over and above the straight needs imposed on it by the struggle for existence, which it can spare for self-expression. It has been lured on to these manifestations mainly by that “will to live” which underlies the attractions of sex. That exuberance is an essential feature of the evolutionary process at the point where self-realisation by self-reproduction is the game to play. Under that impulse the selective principle begins to assert itself, and straightway the outcome is ornament. Self-realisation (by self-reproduction under all sorts of images and symbols) is the true basis of ornament and of art: self-realisation!