We shall consider this pleasing power as it appears in vegetables, in the inferior animals, and in man.
Turning our eyes to the vegetable creation, we find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers are almost of every sort of shape, and of every sort of disposition; they are turned and fashioned into an infinite variety of forms; and from these forms botanists have given them their names, which are almost as various.

What proportion do we discover between the stalks and the leaves of flowers, or between the leaves and the pistils?
How does the slender stalk of the rose agree with the bulky head under which it bends?
but the rose is a beautiful flower; and can we undertake to say that it does not owe a great deal of its beauty even to that disproportion; the rose is a large flower, yet it grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very small, and grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the apple blossom are both beautiful, and the plants that bear them are most engagingly attired, notwithstanding this disproportion.

What by general consent is allowed to be a more beautiful object than an orange-tree, nourishing at once with its leaves, its blossoms, and its fruit?
but it is in vain that we search here for any proportion between the height, the breadth, or anything else concerning the dimensions of the whole, or concerning the relation of the particular parts to each other.

I grant that we may observe in many flowers something of a regular figure, and of a methodical disposition of the leaves.

The rose has such a figure and such a disposition of its petals; but in an oblique view, when this figure is in a good measure lost, and the order of the leaves confounded, it yet retains its beauty; the rose is even more beautiful before it is full blown; in the bud; before this exact figure is formed; and this is not the only instance wherein method and exactness, the soul of proportion, are found rather prejudicial than serviceable to the cause of beauty.
SECTION III.
PROPORTION NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY IN ANIMALS.
That proportion has but a small share in the formation of beauty is full as evident among animals.