The arts have not yet seized upon those wonders from which the world has derived so much benefit. The beautiful statue of Nature (at the entrance of the Jardin des Plantes) should have been surrounded by them; Nature should only be exhibited as she ever lives, amidst faëry triumphs, enthroning her on a mountain of her own beauties. Her first born, the Madrepores, would have furnished the lower strata with their meanders, their stars and their alabaster branches; while above, their sisters, with their bodies and their fine hair would have made a living bed, softly to embrace with caressing love the divine Mother in her dream of eternal maternity. Painting has succeeded in these things no better than sculpture. Her animated flowers have neither the expression nor the true, pure, delicate coloring of the animated flowers, of the nature of which our colored engravings give but a poor and mechanical idea, altogether destitute of the unctuous softness, suppleness, and warm emotion of the flowers of the fields, the woods, the gardens, or animated flowers of the seas. Enamels, even attempted as by Palissy, are too hard and cold; admirable for reptiles and the scales of fish, they are too glaring to resemble these tender and soft creatures that have not even a skin. The little exterior lungs of the annelides, the slight net work in which certain of the Polypes float, the sensitive and ever-moving hairs which support the Medusæ, are objects not merely delicate to sight, but affecting to imagination. They are of every shade, fine and vague, yet warm; as though a balmy breath had become visible. You see an ever-varying, ever-moving rainbow that delights your eye; but for them it is a very serious matter, the creating of that marvellous rainbow, of various forms and colors; it is their blood and their weak life converted into changing hues and tints, and lights and shades. Take care! Do not stifle that little floating soul, which mutely, but oh how eloquently, tells you its secret in those varying and palpitating colors. The colors do not long survive, and their creators, the Madrepores, themselves survive only in their base, which has been called inorganic, but which in reality is condensed and solidified life. Women, who have a more delicate and penetrating sense of the beautiful than we have, do not thus mistake; they have, at the least, confusedly divined that one of these trees, the coral, is a living thing, and thence the just favor in which they hold it. Vainly did science tell them that coral was mere stone, and then that it was a plant, they knew quite differently. "Madame, why is it that you prefer this tree of a dubious red, to all the precious stones?" "Monsieur, it suits my complexion. Rubies are too vivid, they make me look pale, while this, somewhat duller, rather more favorably contrasts fairness."