St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1890-10-12
THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY.
viii the Human Race Become Hid
eOuS as 1t Advances?

viii the Human Race Become Hid
eOuS as 1t Advances?
London Spectator.
Beauty is result of circumstances,
such as personal freedom and mode of
life and of continuousness of diet, and
not of intelligence, still less of the &C.
QUESTION of knowledge, which latter
can only benefit the individual, whose
features are fixed p st serious change
before study is even begun. A man or
woman inherits his or her face,
and mental habitude. though it NAV
greatly affect its meaning, can no more
alter its shape than assiduouS training
can turn smooth fox terrier into
the wiry kind from Airedale.
1t may even be doubted, strange as
many will deem the assertion, whether
continuous education will produce
beauty, whether the growth of intelli-
cal result which we notice the authors
of Utopias always assume, as if it were
a scientifically demonstratable conse-
quence of the new society. The most
beautiful black race in Africa, a
tribe in Nyassaland, on whose looks
even missionaries grow eloquent, and
who are really as perfect as bronze
statues, are as ignorant as fishes, and
though they have discovered the use of
fire have never risen to the conception
of clothes of any kind. The Otaheitan,
when discovered, was as uncuitured as
the Papuan now is; vet the former APP
preached as nearly to positive beauty as
the latter does to positive deformIty.
The keenest race in Asia. and, as all
who know assert. the strongest in char
acter, the Chinese,is decidedly the ugli-
est of semi-civiliZed mankind; while the
Hindoo. if sufficiently fed, iS,even when
as ignorant as an animal, almost invari-
ably handsome. The Circassians, who
know nothing and are rather stupid
than exceptionally intelligent,are physi-
cally faultleSS race, far more so than
the Germans, who, though the best
trained people in the world, display a
marked commences of feature, as if
the great sculptor, Nature, had used
good clay. but taken no trouble about
the modelling. Some of the very ablest
among them belong to the fat-nosed,
pufy-cheeked. loose-lipped variety.
The keeneSt race in the world, and
probably the one most susceptible to
culture, the Jew, presents few types of
beauty, being usually at once hook-nosed
and fiabby-cheeked.t though in physique,
as In thought, that race occasionally
throws out transcendent examples. The
tanned Arabs of Egypt, who seem to
possess poor brains, and, of course have
no education, are often extraordinarily
handsome; while in 1860 the grandest
head in Asia, a head which every artist
copied as his ideal Joye, belonged to
an Arab horse dealer, who, outside
his trade, knew nothing. No modern
men of culture would pretend, In mere
perfectneSs of form, to rival the old
Greek athletes, who Intellectually were
probably animals, or the Berserkars.
who were, for the most part, only hard
drinking soldiers. The royal caste.
which has been cultivated for 1000
years, seldom produces beautiful
men, and still schooner beau
tlful women; most princesses,
though sometimes dignified, having
been marked, as to features, by a
certain Ordinariness often wanting in the
poor, and especially the poor of certain
districts, like Devon in England and
Aries and Marseilles in France. Devon
is no better taught than Suffolk, but
mark the difference in peasant forms.
In the last century the ablest men in
Europe were remarkable for a certain
superfiuity of flesh, of which Gibbons
face is the best known and most absurd
example; and in our own time, intellect,
even hereditary intellect, is constantly