FALLING IN LOVE 5 



A pleasant smile half redeems unattractive features. Low, 

 receding foreheads strike us unfavourably. Heavy, stolid, 

 half-idiotic countenances can never be beautiful, however 

 regular their lines and contours. Intelligence and good- 

 ness are almost as necessary as health and vigour hi order 

 to make up our perfect ideal of a beautiful human face and 

 figure. The Apollo Belvedere is no fool ; the murderers hi 

 the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's are for the 

 most part no beauties. 



What we all fall in love with, then, as a race, is in most 

 cases efficiency and ability. What we each fall in love 

 with individually is, I believe, our moral, mental, and 

 physical complement. Not our like, not our counterpart ; 

 quite the contrary ; within healthy limits, our unlike and 

 our opposite. That this is so has long been more or less a 

 commonplace of ordinary conversation ; that it is scien- 

 tifically true, one time with another, when we take an 

 extended range of cases, may, I think, be almost demon- 

 strated by sure and certain warranty of human nature. 



Brothers and sisters have more hi common, mentally 

 and physically, than any other members of the same race 

 can possibly have with one another. But nobody falls hi 

 love with his sister. A profound instinct has taught even 

 the lower races of men (for the most part) to avoid such 

 union of the all-but-identical. In the higher races the idea 

 never so much as occurs to us. Even cousins seldom fall 

 in love seldom, that is to say, in comparison with the 

 frequent opportunities of intercourse they enjoy, relatively 

 to the remainder of general society. When they do, and 

 when they carry out their perilous choice effectively by 

 marriage, natural selection soon avenges Nature upon the 

 offspring by cutting off the idiots, the consumptives, the 

 weaklings, and the cripples, who often result from such 

 consanguineous marriages. In narrow communities, where 



