Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/40

34 which throw experimental light on the sexual relations of the nose.

That both the eyes and ears are beauty marks, and that, in the female especially, they have been selected for especial emphasis by lovers and poets, you are well aware. Both love and poetizing, as most of us well know from our own experience, are conditions of irresponsibility in which the fundamental instincts and habits have large sway; and the first condition usually brings on the second; accordingly the beauty-points which fix the attention of poets demand our attention. But there is little to offer at present in the way of analysis of these. Aside from the indication of physical condition which the eyes afford (and every physician makes use of these indications), the importance of the eye is probably largely racial. The blue or the black, the large or the small, are not in themselves of moment, but they indicate stocks from which we expect certain other characters, mental and physical. The same general consideration is probably involved in ear preferences. This is however by no means the whole story. Anyone who has studied the religious and art symbolism of primitive peoples, and of people not so primitive (I do not refer to the crude and artificial studies of the Freudians) cannot help but see very definite reasons for the fascination of the eye and ear, reasons which are more appropriately discussed