Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/838

820 rule to be almost, if not altogether, infallible. Can Professor Fowler point out a corresponding difference in the shape of the posterior skull? "Amativeness," too, may or may not affect the bones above the nape, but Theophrastus, Galen, Delia Porta, Lavater, Dr. Redfield, and all portrait-painters, agree that it is disclosed by the eyelids, especially the lower ones.

Lavater and other critical students of the human face have shown the fallacy of some popular notions—for instance, the connection of a high forehead with superior intelligence—but also that generally received opinions differ less in different nations and ages than should be supposed; and it is surprising of what minute symptoms even the ancient nations have taken cognizance.

There is, indeed, hardly a facial muscle that has not been suspected of betraying mental peculiarities. "A forehead loaded with wrinkles" Aristotle supposes to indicate a gloomy, morose, and overbearing disposition, and furthermore thinks that, if these wrinkles are massed over the eye, it denotes cruelty. According to Galen, a depression in the center of the forehead announces a melancholy temper or a recollection of an awful crime, though he admits that physical excesses may produce the same effect.

"Vertical incisions in the bone of the forehead," says Lavater, "belong exclusively to persons of uncommon capacity and to independent thinkers." Perpendicular wrinkles he holds to be the emblems of wrath, because such furrows are formed in the paroxysm of that passion. If the forehead is crowded with horizontal wrinkles, it may indicate ferocity or severe mental application, but their entire absence can only be the effect of a cheerful disposition.

"If the frontal bone is convex," says Huart, "it indicates an undeveloped mind; all infants have such foreheads, and, under the influence of culture, the curve gradually disappears." Winckelmann indorses this notion, and thinks that the more straight lines the forehead exhibits the more judgment it will indicate, but at the same time so much the less sensibility. Wrinkles lengthwise between the eyebrows, Huart interprets as a sign of habitual melancholy reflections, and he, as well as Lavater and Redfield, believes that the prominence of the bone immediately above the eyebrows denotes aptitude for long-continued mental labor. "If asked what a low forehead denotes," Dr. Cams remarks, "I should say a vigorous scalp, or a predominating lateral development of the skull, but certainly not a low degree of intelligence"; and Horace went so far as to celebrate a frons tenuis as a sign of an ingenious mind.

"Gently arched eyebrows," says Campanella, "accord with the modesty and simplicity of a virgin; rough, irregular ones are the signs of ungovernable vivacity," and Dr. Redfield adds that on this point the physiognomists of all nations agree. If the hair of the eyebrows is thin or begins to fall out, Dr. Haller regards it as a sure