158 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



PHYSIOGNOMY AND GENIUS 



By CHARLES KASSEL 



FORT WOETH, TEXAS 



SAYS Edwin Miller Wheelock in that great prose epic of evolution 

 which he called Proteus: 



Our humanity has been evolved out of the lower and coarser types of life 

 and faces still hang out the signs of this experience in the vulture beak, the 

 bull-dog visage, the swinish aspect. This face is a bear's muzzle; that a snout. 

 This one is written over with a foulness that needs no label; here is a rat and 

 there an abject thing cringing for leave to be. The old brutehood lurks in each 

 cerebellum and the nobler faculties of man sleep in their shell. 



Since the uprise of the theory of evolution with its emphasis upon 

 the physical tokens of kinship between man and the animals, the old 

 science of physiognomy, which formed a favorite study of the ancients, 

 and to which the great Aristotle himself devoted six weighty chapters, 

 has come forth from its hiding amidst the discarded superstitions of 

 the past. The time-worn rules for determining character from coun- 

 tenance have gained a genuine interest for the scientific mind, and 

 even the old saws and proverbs — crystallizations of mankind's observa- 

 tion of faces and features for unnumbered generations — have taken on 

 a dignity and value which they could not else have borne. 



It is to the criminologists, however, that we are indebted for the 

 first distinct step toward a scientific study of physiognomy, and their 

 labors give hint of the large results which might be possible to an in- 

 vestigation of wider scope. Thus, we are informed by Havelock Ellis, 

 in his interesting and instructive work " The Criminal," that the reced- 

 ing forehead, prognathous jaw, and long, projecting and voluminous 

 ears are in general characteristics of the criminal, while, according to 

 Lombroso, the homicide may be known by his cold, fixed and glassy 

 eye, beaked nose, prominent jaws and cheek bones, thin lips, and, not 

 infrequently spasmodic contractions on one side of the face. " Among 

 petty criminals, those who are criminals by weakness," says Ellis, " a 

 type of receding chin is found," and he adds, " the typical thief's nose 

 is rectilinear, often incurved, short and twisted, with lifted base." 



Deep-rooted as is the instinct for inferring character from coun- 

 tenance, it is not a little remarkable that the one ripe and ready field for 

 the study of physiognomy has remained thus long unexplored. The 

 pages of biography should afford rich spoil for the curious delver after 

 hidden laws of mind and morals, and it seems that a tabulation of the 

 faces and figures of eminent personages should long since have sug- 

 gested itself as desirable, if not indispensable. 



