Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/70

 advance of the other, until they merge in the semicircular arcs which define the chief and highest beauty of woman—the breasts.

There should especially be no hollows under the collar-bones, over the apex of the lungs. When present, they signify more than a want of comeliness—they betoken the danger, if not the actual presence, of that fatal and frequent disease, pulmonary consumption. It is precisely in that spot that the physician searches for the earliest warnings of this malady, and who can think of mortal, perishable beauty, when he sees the stealthy hand of death already claiming these charms?

THE BREASTS AND WAIST.

Symbols of maternal love and fruitfulness, deeply in sympathy with all feminine instincts and sensations, well-formed breasts have ever been considered by artists essential requisites of beauty. They should be firm and elastic, rising from the chest true hemispheres in shape, situated neither too high nor too low. The distance from the nipple to the lower edge of the collar bone of the same side should equal that from one nipple to the other, which, in turn, should be precisely one-fourth of the circumference of the chest at their level. The space between the bases should equal the diameter of the base of either.

Yet alas! in this artificial life of ours, how often