Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/200

170 marks are clearly visible in the varieties of the national character. Nevertheless, the race-type as a whole is, as we have said, the most distinctly individual in our existing civilizations.

Distinct as he is, the Chinese seems to touch the ethno- logic world at a great variety of points. In hint and shadow he is a kind of Middle Kingdom. By his black eyes, thin beard, high cheek bones, coarse lips, and impassive air, he resembles the American race ; by his facial angle he ap- proaches the Aryan; by his flattened nose, the negro. He has Mongolic features softened as by a feminine element, and bleached as by some Samoyede or Siberian infusion; his half-wild expression suggests the Greek satyr; and the apparent obliqueness of his eyelids, owing^ to the very slight opening of their inner angles, points to his origin in those high latitudes where Nature is observed to protect the lachrymal structure of ruminants in the same way.

Quality of the type.

Thus widely related in form, the Chinese face is capable of much dignity and beauty. The conventional Chinaman on Canton ware is a caricature. I have myself seen a large collection of photographic portraits, in which the phrenological and aesthetic development is fully equal on the whole to the European. Williams observes that Chinese women resemble the Europeans, more than Hindu or Persian, in preserving their vigor after child-birth. The beauty of the maidens is celebrated by Fleming, and their healthy development and delicacy of manners by Courcy. Whether the difference between the natives of northern and southern provinces is as great as has been represented is doubtful; but the muscularity and shapeliness of the peasantry in general is beyond dispute: and in this respect, at least, they deserve the name of the