824 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" The smallest heads," says Aristotle, " are generally stored with 

 the largest share of sense, and the same rule applies to other extremi- 

 ties. If the hands and feet are small in proportion to the size of the 

 trunk, it betokens a refined mind, a noble ancestry." Lavater would 

 trust only to first impressions. " If I begin to analyze features," he 

 confesses, "I am biased by my prejudices, and persuade myself to 

 consider a head a bad one because it exhibits features which my pet 

 theory objects to. But there are laws of compensation which assert 

 themselves in the tout ensemble impression." 



" In many faces I have seen an habitual expression which at first 

 puzzled me," says Kant, " but I have found that by mimicking that 

 characteristic look my mind involuntarily turns in the direction of that 

 person's predominating passion, and thus furnishes me a key to the 

 problem." 



"How is it," asks Dr. Haller, "that crafty and designing persons 

 use to keep one, or sometimes both eyes, half shut ? and that only 

 children and animals are honest enough to meet your glance with per- 

 fect unconcern ? To other features I look for pathological indications, 

 but the eye alone is the mirror of the mind." 



Lord Byron, in matters of that sort perhaps a better observer, 

 seems to have formed quite a different view. " Hold on, let me see the 

 jaw," he called out, when Shelley's body was removed from the beach 

 of Spezzia " I can recognize any one by the teeth with whom I have 

 talked. I always watch the lips and mouth : they tell what the tongue 

 and eyes try to conceal." 



" Let a beginner draw a head," says Le Brun, " and the face will 

 always bear an expression of stupidity ; never one of malignity or 

 wickedness. Is not here an important hint ? Stupidity, as expressed 

 in mind or body, is incongruity, while in a scoundrel the mental ma- 

 chinery may be well arranged and very efficient, though working in 

 the wrong direction. Mental turpitude can rarely be discovered in the 

 features ; mental derangement which all foolishness more or less 

 amounts to very easily." 



The comparison of some special rules reveals even stranger contra- 

 dictions. Buffon, who himself loved a well-stocked larder, accepts 

 embonpoint as a safe sign of mental health. " Crazy people," he in- 

 forms us, " are always haggard ; harmony of the mental and moral 

 faculties is favorable to the development of fat." Redfield, with the 

 same plausibility, demonstrates the exact reverse. " Only stupid 

 brutes accumulate fat," says he, " oxen, sheep, and swine. Mental ac- 

 tivity stimulates our torpid organs, but a sluggish brain induces phys- 

 ical inertia and fatty degeneration. . . . Dr. Swift," he adds, "was 

 lean as long as he applied himself to letters ; he afterward lost the 

 main part of his reason and then became plump again." "A fat, short 

 neck," says Pliny, " announces a mind ferocious," but Sir Charles Bell 

 distinctly tells us that it indicates good-natured laziness and love of a 



