Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/852

828 . The camera is doubtless useful to beginners, and helps them to avoid great errors; but the artist has nothing to do with it; he takes his inspiration from Nature, and his canon will vary according to the subject he treats. A slender and nimble runner will not have the proportions of an athlete. Furthermore, the artist will put something of his own into his subject, exaggerating, usually without thinking of it, some features that have impressed him, and ignoring others.

Such departure from truth is not necessarily wrong. Exaggeration, like all our tendencies, may have a good or a bad result, according to the use that is made of it. We reprehend it when it develops unpleasant traits into undue prominence, or when it imprisons us in inconvenient and unseemly garments. But when it emphasizes among the traits of our countenance those which are associated with intelligence, bringing out the forehead which thinks, augmenting the facial reliefs upon which emotion is expressed, and retiring the merely physical features, it offers an attractive ideal and one that should not be despised.

We are not wrong when we admire the beauty of those among us in whom the characteristics of our race are exaggerated. They possess in the highest degree those features which are in course of development, they represent the generations of the future, and are worthy, by this title, to be perpetuated.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.



ERRI passes in review 1,711 individuals, of whom 711 are soldiers, 699 criminals, and 301 madmen. In this minute examination of anthropometric data he discusses almost every case, pointing out its specific characteristics by means of ample comparisons, which justify his methods of research and his conclusions, as well as throw light on the difficult and not yet firmly established study of criminal anthropology. To close this section of his learned work, he devotes a portion to the reaffirmation of the inferiority of criminal as compared with normal man, and to the analogy that certain anomalies and delinquent characteristics present, deducing thence criminal degeneracy. Very remarkable are the differences of cephalometric characteristics between a certain number of soldiers examined, among whom were some students. The superiority of the latter was incontestably proved by the great anterior semicircumference of the head, by the greater 