Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/85

Rh found one single head of this ideal perfection. Neither the contour of the cheeks, nor the lines of the countenance, are the same on both sides, and they are all the less so because every one unconsciously tends to perform many unilateral facial movements, which in time cause a divergence between the two sides of the face. Besides, the head, projecting as it does freely into air, is more dependent than we imagine on wind and weather. Suppose a person were to sit constantly at a window, turning one side to the cooler atmosphere out-of-doors, and the other toward a hot stove—the result would be a twofold growth of the facial muscles. One side of the face might become rounded, the other flat or concave; and, though such faces are not unfrequent, we do not notice the anomaly, simply because we are accustomed to it. In the Lapp we have a good illustration of this unequal development. Just as the trees of his native land are stunted, so too his features become monstrous, irregular, and one-sided: the frontal bones are forced, as though by spasm, down on the maxillaries, producing the most singular combinations and contortions of the features. A not uncommon form of asymmetry, in more favored lands, is the presence of a dimple on one cheek, while the other has no such indentation, or but a very faint one. In such cases the face has, as it were, a summer and a winter side, just like the apple, which is round and ruddy on its summer side, but on the shade-side flattened and wan.

We are too much inclined to regard these phenomena of asymmetry as merely accidental, whereas the fact is that they are the result of a universal law. Take, for instance, the case where the mustache is longer or thicker on one side of the lip than on the other; the law is everywhere the same: nothing is like any thing else, as Goethe has said. Throughout the entire organic world, and even down to the inorganic creation, down to the world of crystals, nothing that wears a specific form attains the full perfection of that form. I once requested a friend of mine, a mathematician, to reduce to a single formula the curves of an ivy-leaf. He spent weeks in measuring and calculating, but at last gave up the undertaking as an impossibility: no leaf was like another. Indeed, were Nature's forms ideally perfect, the result would be primness rather than beauty. Observe how powerfully the expression of the face is affected by the asymmetry between the upper and lower rows of teeth. The position of the eyes at equal distances on each side of the median line of the face—the nose—might seem to be indispensable for beauty, and yet how very rarely are the eyes placed with perfect symmetry! The wonder is, that these asymmetries of the face should be, after all, so slight as they are, considering how serious are the impediments placed in its way by the requirements of bodily growth. That the two halves of our body should grow so uniformly as they do, except in a very few instances, is the best evidence of the absolute unity of this form of organism, which is based on the vertebral column, and developed along with it.