Beauty in the Eyes of an Evolutionist . 129 
BEAUTY IN THE EYES OF AN 
EVOLUTIONIST. 
By F. Ram. 
(Concluded from page 81.) 
(flsj) ARRY, in one of his Royal Academy Lectures, observes 
dp) that we should not add to woman’s beauty by any 
increase in the number of her mammalian protu- 
berances. But we may safely assert that, if any increase in 
the number of these protuberances had led to her raising 
offspring superior in number or viability to those raised under 
the present arrangement, men would see beauty in this nu- 
merical increase ; artists would have bestowed them on the 
Goddess of Beauty, and mammae in duplicate only would 
have been repulsive. 
One of the many points in which the taste of other races 
differs from our own is the fondness for extreme obesity 
which resides in the minds of some savages. Can it be 
doubted that Famine — which has been the chief factor in 
the production of the bodies and minds of all living crea- 
tures — has also been the originator of this strange taste ? 
For the man who desired a fat wife would have been always 
more likely to have his babes sustained through a time of 
straitness than one who was contented with a woman who 
had laid in a smaller store of nutriment on her own person. 
In a minor degree this faCt is seen amongst ourselves at the 
present day, the leaner females — in the classes in which 
there is much choice of wives — being more usually left to 
become old maids. This faCt bears witness to the existence 
of famines in former days. But such a taste could not be 
expected to be strong in a race whose ancestors secured a 
scanty living by means of much activity in hunting. Such 
people would rather pick out their mates with reference to 
the agility which they saw displayed at some dance or 
corroborree, and would look rather for grace, or beauty in 
movement : on which account their descendants perhaps are 
pleased at the sight of the agility displayed by ballet-girls. 
Some parts of the human body are beautiful chiefly by 
smallness, of which we may instance the shell of the ear. 
This, it is generally now allowed, is a useless rudimentary 
excrescence, and its maintenance has probably been a mere 
waste of material for tens of thousands of generations. As 
the ear-shell must, as is shown by its existence, have been 
1882.] 
II. 
