Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/26

 20 peculiarities signify. They may be good, clever, or admirable, but never beautiful.

These details are in part relative. Among certain African tribes, where men are uniformly over seven feet tall, and as thin as a rail, a normal Anglo-Saxon is probably not beautiful. Among other African tribes, and certain islanders of the Pacific, a woman is not considered beautiful unless she reaches a degree and a distribution of fatness which makes her either repulsive or comical to European eyes. This relativity is, however, only superficial. The type which is highest in value tends to approximate the European type, wherever the European type becomes known. All dark races prefer white skin, and it is a general rule that the female of the inferior race prefers the male of the superior race to the male of her own race, no matter how striking the difference. That the inferior male considers the superior female more beautiful than the female of his own race is indicated everywhere, and clearly demonstrated among the Turks.

Deviation from the common type, then, is a drawback only when it is not a deviation towards the acknowledged superior type of another race. The conservative dislike for the unusual in general is tempered by approval when the unusual is clearly a mark of racial superiority. This will