Amongst the purely picturesque objects of inanimate nature, I may, as in a former work, instance an ancient oak tree, for its beauty is enhanced by want of apparent symmetry. Thus, the more fantastically crooked its branches, and the greater the dissimilarity and variety it exhibits in its masses of foliage, the more beautiful it appears to the artist and the amateur; and, as in the human figure, any attempt to produce variety in the proportions of its lateral halves would be destructive of its symmetrical beauty, so in the oak tree any attempt to produce palpable similarity between any of its opposite sides would equally deteriorate its picturesque beauty. But picturesque beauty is not the result of the total absence of symmetry; for, as none of the irregularly constructed music of nature could be pleasing to the ear unless there existed in the arrangement of its notes an obedience, however subtle, to the great harmonic law of Nature, so neither could any object be picturesquely beautiful, unless the arrangement of its parts yields, although it may be obscurely, an obedience to the same law. However symmetrically beautiful any architectural structure may be, when in a complete and perfect state, it must, as it proceeds towards ruin, blend the picturesque with the symmetrical; but the type of its beauty will continue to be the latter, so long as a sufficient portion of it remains to convey an idea of its original perfection. It is the same with the human form and countenance; for age does not destroy their original beauty, but in both only lessens that which is symmetrical, while it increases that which is picturesque. In short, as a variety of simultaneously produced sounds, which do not relate to each other agreeably to this law, can only convey to the mind a feeling of mere noise; so a variety of forms or colours simultaneously exposed to the eye under similar circumstances, can only convey to the mind a feeling of chaotic confusion, or what may be termed _visible_ discord. As, therefore, the two principles of uniformity and variety, or similarity and dissimilarity, are in operation in every harmonious combination of the elements of sound, of form, and of colour, we must first have recourse to numbers in the abstract before we can form a proper basis for a universal science of beauty. THE SCIENCE OF BEAUTY EVOLVED FROM THE HARMONIC LAW OF NATURE, AGREEABLY TO THE PYTHAGOREAN SYSTEM OF NUMERICAL RATIO. The scientific principles of beauty appear to have been well known to the ancient Greeks; and it must have been by the practical application of that knowledge to the arts of Design, that that people continued for a period of upwards of three hundred years to execute, in every department of these arts, works surpassing in chaste beauty any that had ever before appeared, and which have not been equalled during the two thousand years which have since elapsed.