It is worth while to remember that Beauty is no outcome of a long period of evolution; it is no late event in the geologic history of the world. The lowest forms of organic life no less than the highest are clad in beauty. Many beings that are "simple structureless protoplasm"--to use the language of Professor Allman as President of the British Association this year--"fashion for themselves an outer membraneous or calcareous case, often of symmetrical form and elaborate ornamentation, or construct a silicious skeleton of radiating spicula or crystal-clear concentric spheres of exquisite symmetry and beauty."[22] So, too, in the Silurian period, the corals and other marine structures were, no doubt, endowed with every grace which could please the eye of man, if he had been there. Beauty is the invariable companion of Nature. It is difficult, therefore, to account for it as a result of evolution; and, as for the theory that it was made for man's delectation only, a single diatom or a single fossil from a Silurian bed is enough to put the whole vain egotism to flight. What are the results fairly deducible from these observations? They seem to be the following:-- 1. That conspicuousness is _a_ step towards fertilization in one mode, and might, therefore, well be used by an artist loving at once beauty and fertility. 2. That there is no such preponderating advantage in beauty as should convert the ugly anemophilous flowers into the brilliant entomophilous flowers. 3. That in an infinite number of cases beauty exists, but without any relation to the mode of fertilization. 4. That it is maintained in many cases where the uglier and less beautiful plant is more useful, as in the case of the violet. 5. That even where conspicuousness is useful, it furnishes no complete account of the whole beauty of the flower. Let us apply these facts to the two rival theories. If, on the one hand, nothing has become beautiful but through the utility of beauty, beauty will be found where it is useful and nowhere else. But we have found beauty without finding utility; so that theory, on our present knowledge, is inadmissible. If, on the other hand, there be an artificer in Nature who loves at once utility and beauty, he may use the one sometimes as a mean to the other, or he may use beauty without utility; and the presence of beauty without utility is intelligible.