64 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of every country, but confesses that the problem is rather an evasive 

 one, the coast-dwellers of Sweden being as distinguished for their come- 

 liness as the highlanders of Aragon, and the Normandy cider-drinkers 

 not less than the Tuscan wine-drinkers. His only general rule, however, 

 still holds good : that out-door dwellers are never wholly ill-favored, 

 nor in-door workers altogether lovely ; and we might say the same of 

 alcohol-drinkers and total abstainers : the schnapps-worshiping na- 

 tives of the Tyrolese highlands make amends by their active out-door 

 life, as Lowell factory-girls by their teetotalism. There is a good deal 

 in race, though. " Angeli sunt non Angli" Pope Stephen III wrote 

 more than a thousand years ago to Archbishop Cuthbert, who had sent 

 him a batch of Anglo-Saxon neophytes, and a trace of the same angelic 

 features may still be recognized among the little ragamuffins of many 

 a Schleswig-Holstein coast-village, where men subsist on brandy, 

 cheese, and sour rye-bread. Their neighbors, the Pomeranians, are a 

 manful if not celestial generation, and, in spite of their dreary moor- 

 lands, very fond of out-door sports. But farther east Nature suc- 

 cumbs to art, and the northern Russians are about as outrageously 

 unprepossessing as indoor-life and a combination of all vices could 

 make the image of the Creator. Extremes meet, though, and their 

 Emperor has the honor of commanding twelve regiments of the most 

 godlike men of the present world the lance-cuirassiers of the body- 

 guard, recruited in the highlands of Lesghia and Daghestan. Nearly 

 all the natives of the Caucasus have that fatal gift of beauty which 

 made their land the favorite hunting-ground of the harem-agents, and 

 this gave the Czar a pretext for treating it as a Turkish dependency. 

 But no social degradation could counteract the combined influence of 

 the Caucasian climate, hardy habits, temperance, and frugality, for the 

 Circassian mountaineers are teetotalers by religion and vegetarians by 

 preference figs, honey, barley-cakes, and milk, being the staples of 

 their diet. They are physically self-made men, for their language 

 proves that their ancestors were Turanians first-cousins of the owl- 

 faced nomads of the Mongolian steppe. 



Pernetti believes that "the study of physiognomy has been neglected 

 since men began to neglect their good looks, to which the classic nations 

 attached an importance which we can nowadays hardly comprehend." 

 Since Pernetti confines his remarks to his own sex we may plead guilty 

 to his indictment, and it is true that the ancients combined their hero- 

 ics with a good deal of Beau-Brummelism. " He abuses the right of a 

 man to be ugly," Madame de Stael said of one of her admirers, but the 

 ancient Greeks denied that right altogether, and their intolerance in 

 this respect seems to have surpassed anything one could mention of 

 contemporary notions, though it may be true that the military acade- 

 mies of Prussia and Saxony make homeliness a bar to admission. 

 Even Plato, in his "Republic," advises his lawgiver to oppose all 

 habits that might tend to lower the standard of physical aesthetics ; 



