Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/84

74 only a minority of mankind have their noses right in the middle of their faces; and most of us have our noses very much out of place without suspecting it.

But the eyes! Surely, those windows of the soul, can never be charged with asymmetry! I used to think Nature had too correct an aesthetic sense to do such a thing as that. But I know two persons, one of whom, a man, has one eye brown and one blue; the other of them, a woman, has one eye blue and one black—her hair being brown. In such a state of things, all we can say is, that the blending of the two parents is under some conditions not perfect. Strictly speaking, this too is the case where southronsouthern [sic] and northern, with black hair and blue eyes, or with light hair and black eyes, are still in antagonism, and where consequently the Darwinian force of inheritance is not yet fully established—in other words, where a new race is not yet formed. And, in the face of these facts, what are we to think of the eye as the "mirror of the soul?" Here one eye flashes and threatens, and the other is as mild as the German spring-time, the while only one heart beats and throbs in the bosom. Nay, the heart itself is not always in its own place; it sometimes occupies the right side of the chest. But it is of the eyes I was speaking, and not of the heart. I do not propose to discuss the whole question of the color of the eyes, down to albinism; I would simply observe that, as seen through them, the world wears a very different aspect for different individuals—a circumstance which, however, has nothing to do with asymmetry. Some eyes see only complementary colors, e. g., red instead of green; others see no color at all, every thing appearing to them like a copperplate engraving.

But color, too, has its caprices, as shown in the hair. I once asked an acquaintance why he did not allow his mustache to grow. His reply was, because on one side it was light brown, and on the other white; and he bade me look at his eyebrows, where I would find at least a partial confirmation of what he said. In fact, my friend had not stated the whole truth, for the dualism was faintly discernible even in the hair of his head. When a boy, I knew a whole family, the young members of which had each on the poll one or two locks of white hair. It was but yesterday I discovered, among my Christian neighbors, a descendant of Abraham, having black, curly hair, but blue eyes, and light eyebrows and mustache—the latter being as becoming to its handsome wearer as if his hair had been brown. Clearly a reversion from Western race-mixture to the Oriental type! I am confident that similar anomalies might often be noted if the attention were directed to them.

There are many other facial anomalies, which fail to attract attention, because we have grown accustomed to them. We should expect the convex cast of one side of the face to fit, line for line, into the concave cast of the other; but it is doubtful if there is to be anywhere