822 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



himself was a little short, though not to such a distressing degree as 

 his master Socrates. Caesar, Trajan, and the Abassides had such 

 noses ; also Henri Quatre and the founder of the Hapsburg dynasty. 

 Rudolph von Hapsburg, though a righteous man and of peaceful dis- 

 position, so aggravated the German nobility by the size of his nose 

 that his election to the imperial dignity gave general offense, and even 

 men who had favored his nomination on account of his brilliant record 

 were scandalized after meeting him face to face. But the emperor's 

 judicious administration soon made his face so popular that he was 

 besieged by portrait-painters, and once exclaimed in dismay : " God 

 help me ! Every fool who can draw a big nose wants to take my like- 

 ness ! " 



The Latins called such men nasones, and Ovid's influential family 

 carried that name as a patronymic. Large hooked noses, according to 

 Cuvier, Lavater, and Pernetti, indicate aggressiveness, love of con- 

 quest, and acquisitiveness, and their views are certainly supported by 

 the abnormal development of those propensities among the ancient 

 Romans and modern Jews. "When the aggressive instincts of the 

 ancient Italians were suppressed," says Pernetti," " their noses shrunk 

 to their present dimensions ; exceptional individuals who have pre- 

 served the martial spirit of our ancestors are also conspicuous for their 

 vigorous noses." The family of Napoleon must have preserved these 

 characteristics in all their pristine vigor ; his nose was as aggravating 

 as his policy, and the shape of his chin was a triumph for Winckel- 

 mann's theory. 



But, after all, such noses are preferable to the other extreme, the 

 blunt hoggish snouts of the Calmucks and Southern Russians. A nez 

 retrousse, a back-turned nose, the great Frederick considered as unpar- 

 donable in a soldier or any adult male of the Caucasian race, and was 

 as proud of his own classic profile as of his best campaign. " God 

 made the Roman, and man made the snub," says Dr. Wells, and 

 Lavater demands a straight or cfcnm -turned nose as a sine qua non of 

 a good face. " I never can look at a pug-nose without painful emo- 

 tions," says he ; " it makes it so sadly probable that our race has de- 

 generated. I am sure Adam was not cursed with such a feature." 



With a flat nose Gall associates sensuality and a groveling disposi- 

 tion ; Dr. Redfield, also, want of energy and even of self-respect. 

 But Zopyrus,.the Athenian Spurzheim, went so far as to denounce a 

 bulbous nose as a sign of a semi-bestial origin, and informed Socrates 

 that one of his ancestors must have been guilty of an inhuman mesal- 

 liance of some sort, and that the shape of his nose " implied a tend- 

 ency to drunkenness, theft, brutality, and lasciviousness " ! It might 

 be interesting to know what Zopyrus would have said about such 

 noses as Gortchakoff's or ex-Senator Morrissey's, or the still greater 

 deformity which made the face of Edward Gibbon a phenomenon. 



The portraits of Socrates, in spite of that defect, exhibit a face 



