Page:Bierce - Collected Works - Volume 09.djvu/28

23 personal appearance or the nature of its pursuits. It is as if man had withdrawn his lip-service from the nasal setting sun.

It is, then, well understood, even outside of "scientific circles," that the incompossibility of civilization and the human nose is more than a golden dream of the optimist. Indubitably that once indispensable organ is falling into the sere and yellow leaf of disuse, and in the course of a few thousand generations will have been wiped off the face of the earth. Its utility as an organ of sense decreases year by year — except as a support for the kind of eyeglasses bearing its name in French; not a sufficiently important service to warrant nature in preserving it. The final effacement has been foreseen from the earliest dawn of art. The ancient Grecian sculptors, for example, who were great trimmers and were ever eager to know which way the physiognomical cat would jump, tried to represent the human face of the future rather than that of their period ; and it is noticeable that most of their statues and busts are distinguished by a striking lack of nose, as above intimated. That is justly regarded as a most significant circumstance — a prophecy of the conclusion now reached by modern science