Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/384

368 in the look of a number of "sandwich men" in the Strand who had been dressed up in cast-off French uniforms. The men seemed all of the feeble, woe-begone class from which sandwich men are usually recruited, but under the shadow of the military caps their faces looked stern and resolute, and their eyes had quite lost that watery, vacillating look which is engendered by alcohol and despair.

Sculptors and painters almost always exaggerate the brow and the shadow it casts when representing idealized human figures. It is an essential of the manly type of beauty to possess this certificate of manly qualities. We all know how weak and unimpressive is the prominent eye which is not shadowed by a lowered lid or brow. The reason of this is that people with such eyes have a startled look similar to that of a frightened animal. It is one of the painful duties of a physician to watch the facial changes which take place in various diseases, and in one known as exophthalmic goitre the eyes tend to become more and more prominent. The result is that the face has an aspect which so exactly simulates the expression of sudden fear that it is often difficult to believe that the patient is not feeling great alarm.

We are constantly influenced by the automatic tendency to form judgmentsjudgements [sic] about the character from ocular expression when we come in contact with those whose eyes are altered in appearance by accident or disease. Thus when a person is suffering from the involuntary to-and-fro shifting of the eyes known as nystagmus, it is by no means easy to believe in his sincerity. Probably all of us feel an instinctive prejudice against individuals who squint. The fact that the two eyes are looking in different directions creates an involuntary suspicion of double dealing. This is especially the case when the squint is an external one. Here obviously the fault is in the understanding of the spectator, and not in the moral character of the unfortunate who squints. It is the unreasoning "old man" who is within every one of us who insists on disbelieving in the virtues of a squinting vis-à-vis. Doubtless in those days of pristine simplicity when the ancestral "old man" was in his prime, and as yet incapable of articulate speech, the necessity of understanding ocular language was so great that any being whose eyes were a complete puzzle was justly regarded with distrust. Nearly all monkeys become angry and suspicious when looked at by a person who squints. When we reason the matter out we recognize that this distrustful feeling toward strangers who have crooked eyes is perfectly absurd, and that obliquity of vision can be no possible index of perverted morals. We all feel the prejudice, nevertheless!

Probably the world-wide superstition concerning "the evil eye" has arisen from the sinister aspect of a squint. Bret Harte, in The