which was transmitted from father to son, as the heritage of an uneducated experience.

Yet all that the mass of mankind knows of the human face is confined to a confused collection of vague notions which language could scarcely express. Try to describe to anyone the anatomical or the mimetic features of a face with which you are perfectly familiar, even your own, and you will see how difficult a task it is. Still it is enough to have caught but a glimpse of a man to be able to distinguish him from the millions of other men who people the globe. To see and to give an account of what you have seen are two very different things. When we look at a face, we rapidly note the most expressive and most characteristic features, by a sort of internal stenography. We keep this stenographic image in our memory, and, thanks to it, we recognize each other, and it suffices for the ordinary uses of life. Sometimes we note but one feature, the most salient one, and from this single feature we frame an appellation. whites give the name of blacks to all the people of Africa and Australasia, because a tint so different from their own instantly strikes their attention. In the same way we say a lame man, a man with a long nose, a thick-lipped man; we speak of stupid or licentious faces, of handsome or ugly faces, although besides these characteristics, these faces present many others which go to make up the sum of their individuality.

The

All parts of the human face are not of equal importance in serving to distinguish one man from another. De Rubeis demonstrates this in his "Treatise on the Reproduction of Physiognomies:"

"Physiognomy has two distinct features, one principal, the other accessory. The following hypothesis will show of what the first consists. You have a friend, whom you see

very often, who is a frequenter of your house.. Suppose he covers his head with something which encircles his face and hides his lower lip, his forehead and half his cheeks. The rest, that is, the eyes, nose and upper lip, remain uncovered. Although the greater part of his face is thus concealed, you recognize him at once, because the distinctive features are visible. On the contrary, let your friend remove his head-dress; his hair is arranged as usual, and he merely holds a small black mask before his face, extending from the middle of his forehead to the middle of his nose, covering the tiny space. occupied by the orbits of his eyes. His friends will be unable to recognize him, especially if he has changed the cut or color of his customary clothes. Thus, that part of the face stretching from the nasal bone to the middle of the forehead, and lying between the temples, is the distinctive feature of the face, and that part which comprises the upper part of the cheeks and the lower part of the nose is the accessory feature."

The error of the vulgar observer consists not only in taking two or three characteristic features as the stenographic image of all faces, but also in confounding the form or anatomy with a very different thing -the movement or expression. This second fundamental error has slipped into all the popular treatises on physiognomy. It is very recently that anatomy has been separated from mimetics and that they have been studied separately. One man has little, short-sighted eyes, a long, crooked nose and a big, misshapen mouth; another man has fine, large eyes, a Grecian nose and a beautiful mouth: Yet they may both laugh alike and express love and hate in one and the same way. They are unlike anatomically; they are alike physiologically or mimetically.

If, by analysis, we separate all the

elements which we find in the human face, without submitting it to that other analytical operation made by the scalpel, we may draw up the following list of anatomical and mimetic elements of the human face: Size of the face and skull and their mutual relations; length and breadth of the face and their mutual relations; situation of the different parts of the face; general form; color; forehead; eyes, eyebrows, eyelids and lashes; nose; mouth; chin; cheeks; ears; teeth; hair and beard; blemishes; wrinkles; various mimetic motions.

Each of these elements may, in its turn, be resolved into secondary elements, as we shall see in succeeding chapters. From all these elements taken together, we can draw conclusions which have reference to the successive epochs or accidents of life: Sex; age; health or disease; various changes, pathologic or traumatic, undergone in the course of a lifetime.

If we desire to reduce the conclusions to be drawn from a human face to a small number, by a more precise and scientific formula, we may say that there are five: Physiological, ethnical, æsthetic, moral and intellectual. The ethnic and the æsthetic conclusions are almost wholly based upon the anatomical features. The physiological, moral and intellectual conclusions, on the contrary, depend more upon mimetics than upon anatomy.

In theoretical works upon drawing, we find certain rules which give us approximately the ordinary relative proportions of a beautiful or, at least, a regular human face. The ancients got these rules from Vitruvius; the moderns from Albert Durer. After Durer's day, men studied the works of classic antiquity, and tried to deduce therefrom the æsthetic laws of human morphology. Many artists on preparing their canvas to paint a portrait, begin by drawing an oval and making a cross within this oval.

Then they divide the height into four parts, each of which is equal to the length of the nose; the breadth into five, each of which equals the width of the eye. But Camper very justly observes that the proportions vary to an endless extent among various individuals, and that it is just these little differences that constitute individuality.

One of the most important features of a human face is the possession or the non-possession of prominent jaws, thick lips and receding forehead. Inthe former case we say that the face is prognathous; this is the type found among negroes, Australians and some Papuans. In the second case, the face is orthognathous; it is that of all superior races. Isidore Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire gave the name eurygnathous to a third type, where the cheek-bones are very prominent and which is found among the Chinese, the Japanese and various branches of the Mongolian and Turanian races. This classification is hierarchic rather than æsthetic, because it corresponds to a particular development of the brain and face. If we consider the middle portion of the face only, there are also two principal forms: One developed from back to front and projecting upon the median line; the other, developed in a tranverse direction, in which the sides are prominent and the middle is flat. The first form is found among Europeans; the second in negroes and even more markedly in Mongolians.

There are long faces and short faces. The former are more frequent among the Aryan and Semitic races, the latter among Mongols. To our thinking, the perfect face should be enframed in a fine oval.

The color of the skin is one of the most general and most salient features which strike us in looking at a human face, and we deduce from it the elements for judging of race, sex,

age and health. The color of the skin depends upon the pigment deposited in it, the way in which the blood is distributed, certain characteristics of the epithelium and the deeper tissues which give to it its peculiar lustre. Broca has tried to reduce all the shades of color of the skin to a small number of elementary tints, which he makes to correspond with a similar set of numbers; the same table serves for the hair. All who have attempted to use this table of colors to define the shades of the human skin have experienced great difficulties. For my own part, I tried to apply it to the study of Laplanders and was forced to give it up entirely. The chief reason is that the skin is much more transparent than the paper on which Broca spread his tints. We cannot compare two colors, one of which comes wholly from reflection, while the other is partly transmitted and partly reflected. Add to this the subjective errors, which, in the matter of colors, are not slight. The table of the Anthropological Society of Paris is apparently scientific and exact; in reality, it is as inexact as the old classic division into white, red, yellow and black, according to which the whites belonged to Europe, the redskins to America, the yellow men to Asia and the blacks to Africa. These are mere modes of cutting the Gordian knot, but not of solving it. I think we shall come very near the truth if we admit three tinges for the human skin: White, black, and the color of dried beans.

The white skin is found in almost all members of the Aryan and Semitic families and in many Polynesians, who are neither Malays nor Papuans, and probably are of common origin with ourselves. The negroes, Papuans, Australians and some East Indian tribes, have black skins. All the other people of the earth are the color of dried beans. If anyone will

take the pains to collect beans of different species and of different degrees of dryness, he will have all the tints of the races called yellow and red. At first sight. it may seem a rough and empirical proceeding to compare the color of the human skin to that of an article of food; but, as a matter of fact, as we are treating of subjective notions, we can give a far more precise idea of a color by saying that it is like dried beans, than by merely using the words olive, earthy brown, or blackish yellow.

Having analyzed the form and characteristics of the human face, we must now analyze its features and examine them one by one. If we consult ancient and modern authors, we shall find an abundance of physiognomic divinations mixed with a very few observations of facts, a strange contrast which well displays the poverty of science and the fertility of human invention! The most obscure physiognomist has a hundred formulas to offer us, each more uncertain than the other, for judging of man's character and intellect by the features of his face; while genuine anthropologists have barely touched upon the subject, in their preoccupation with the skull, which, to them, seemed to contain the deepest secrets of human nature. Midway between physiognomists and anthropologists, we have the artists who have studied the face from an æsthetic standpoint and have formulated their judgments in accordance with their personal taste and the tendency of the school to which they belonged.

The Forehead.

Next to the eye, the forehead is the most faithful interpreter of the intellect. Many centuries before men studied the morphologic hierarchy, according to the scale of evolution, a broad, lofty brow was held to be beautiful and a narrow, receding brow to be hideous. This opin